Leafs give up another lead
But Babcock hopes the short-term pain brings long-term gain
CHICAGO— Marian Hossa, the 37-year-old veteran of three Stanley Cup teams, was paying the Maple Leafs a compliment on the big scoreboard screen during Saturday night’s first intermission.
“They have some young players who can make something out of nothing,” Hossa said of Toronto’s NHLers.
That’s the idea, both on the ice and in the big picture for Toronto this season, to finally create something in the name of a franchise that, for too long, has given its fans next season after season of nothing. So maybe there was no better place to find the template than the United Center, where three Stanley Cup banners have been hung since a special group of young players arrived to resurrect a club left for dead.
Toronto head coach Mike Babcock, in the lead-up to Saturday’s 5-4 shootout loss the Blackhawks, wasn’t hiding such aspirational sentiments.
“To be honest with you, I’m hoping we’re a lot like Chicago was,” Babcock said.
The coach was thinking back to 2009, when his Red Wings beat the Blackhawks in five games in the Western Conference en route to the Stanley Cup final, the second year of the Jonathan Toews-Patrick Kane era.
The very next season, of course, the Blackhawks would steamroll through the league to end hockey’s then-longeststanding championship drought. That Cup run, and the two that followed in 2013 and 2015, amount to the closest thing we’ve seen to a dynasty in the salary-cap era.
“They’ve had a real good run here. So we’d like to have a real good run,” Babcock said
For the Maple Leafs, there are a zillion steps between here and there, of course. And one will ideally involve keeping a better hold of late-game leads. Five games into the season, Toronto has led in the third period of all five games. And when they opened up a 4-2 advantage about five minutes into Saturday night’s final frame — William Nylander roofing his second goal of the night off another nifty setup from fellow rookie Auston Matthews — it looked as though they might reverse a pattern of collapses. But for the fourth time in five tries, the Leafs failed to ride out a third-period storm.
Chicago’s Artem Anisimov and ex-Leaf Richard Panik scored one minute apart to make it 4-4 with 1:28 left in regulation, the latter goal coming with Chicago goaltender Scott Darling on the bench. The last-ditch flurry meant that the Leafs have now been outscored a cumulative 8-2 in final frames so far this season. And while the Leafs did fine work to survive overtime in which they killed off 2:39 in 4-on-3 disadvantages — many thanks to strong work from goaltender Frederik Andersen — they lost the extra point in a shootout, Artemi Panarin scoring the difference maker.
The easy cliche would suggest the young Leafs need to learn to lock down a victory — “You’ve got to lose some to start winning some,” Nylander reasoned — but Babcock said Saturday’s failure had little to do with his club’s collective age.
“That wasn’t youth tonight at all. It wasn’t young guys that made those mistakes. It was veteran guys that made those mistakes,” Babcock said. “But the last two games, for me, we didn’t get on our heels per se . . . I thought we got on our heels in Winnipeg (where the Leafs blew a 4-0 lead and lost 5-4 in overtime on Wednesday).”
Panik’s goal, mind you, wouldn’t have sat well with Babcock, who before the game pointed out that Panik, who now as six goals in six games, was Toronto’s property before he was traded for Jeremy Morin, later shipped to San Jose in the James Reimer deal.
“(Panik) was a Leaf. It’s hard to believe that he . . . anyway, whatever,” Babcock said, appearing retrospectively miffed by the trade. “Obviously we didn’t have the same value for him as the Hawks do, and he’s proving them right.”
The Leafs have plenty of talent left in the organization, of course. On Saturday, Toronto rookies accounted for six of the nine points on Saturday’s scoresheet, an outburst that gave Toronto’s cadre of six Calder Trophy-eligible players a combined 23 points on the season. The rest of Toronto’s skaters have tallied 23 points combined.
So while Toronto can claim just one regulation win so far — and five points in the first five games, this when Babcock said the goal is to secure six points in each five-game segment — you could understand the coach’s postgame positivity.
“We’ve managed to get points on the road. We could have won every game we’ve played in. We’ve got to find a way to put away the other team for sure, especially in a situation like tonight,” Babcock said. “But all in all, lots of things I’m very pleased with. I think we’re going in the right direction, trending the right way.”
Babcock said he sees parallels between those early Toews-Kane teams and the one he’s coaching now. But it’s not as though you can take your young centre, Auston Matthews, and cast him as the next Toews, with wingers Mitch Marner and William Nylander vying for the role of Kane.
“Everybody wants to be the next Nick Lidstrom, the next (star). But there’s only one Nick Lidstrom. There’s only one Chicago,” Babcock said. “So now you’ve got to create your own path. But we’re starting to have a stable full of kids. You need skill, and then you’ve got to learn how to play. And you’ve got to develop a culture of accepting nothing less than winning.”
That Chicago team didn’t win right away. They missed the playoffs in the first year of the Toews-Kane era. But the next year, when Toews was named captain at age 20, they met Babcock’s Wings in the Western final. The year after that, they were champions.
“I think we all believe in each other in here. We have a lot of upside to us that’s just going to keep getting better,” said Mitch Marner, who had an assist Saturday. “We’re young, but we’re learning a lot throughout the time we’ve been here.”
That’s the idea. Chicago has travelled that path. Toronto will need to find its own way in the journey from nothing to something.