LEAFS ROLL A SEVEN
Toronto strikes early and never looks back in romp over Isles.
It’s one of the great mysteries of this Maple Leafs season. How can an uberskilled squad that promises to bring the franchise back to prominence have such difficulty bringing itself back from deficits?
The Maple Leafs rank dead last in the NHL with a .063 winning percentage in games in which they trailed after the first period. Sixteen times they’ve trailed at the first intermission. Only once have they emerged from the evening with a victory.
So let’s just say head coach Mike Babcock had to be beyond thrilled to watch his club emerge from the opening 20 minutes of Tuesday’s home game against the New York Islanders with a 2-0 advantage. It was just the second time in the past nine outings the Leafs went to the dressing room with a lead at the first intermission. In those previous eight games, they’d managed just two wins.
But with one bugaboo dodged, another challenge loomed. Speaking of statistical extremes, the Leafs, by some measures, have been one of the worst teams in the league at holding leads. Just last week they road-tripped to Brooklyn and watched a 4-2 second-intermission advantage promptly devolve into an overtime loss to the Islanders.
So consider Tuesday’s 7-1 win a move in the correct direction at an important juncture in Toronto’s most promising season in more than a decade. This time the early lead, instead of morphing into a pit of regret, turned into a step-on- their-throats blowout that was raucously celebrated by one of the liveliest Air Canada Centre crowds of recent vintage.
It put some distance between the Leafs and Islanders, whom Toronto now leads by three points in the standings. And it saw Frederik Andersen, after a rough start to his February, make 33 saves in a return to the sort of form that established him as one of the league’s best netminders November through January. It was Andersen’s 100th win as an NHLer, but he said it was more significant to him that it was also Toronto’s 26th win of the season.
“The games only get tougher from here on out,” Andersen was saying before Tuesday’s game. “I think games are getting tougher to come back in … Once you get down, it’s tough to come back. So it’s one of those things: You’ve got to come out taking it to them instead of sitting around and waiting.”
Message received. Goals from Josh Leivo, Nazem Kadri and William Nylander had the Leafs up 3-0 by the midway point of the second period. And such was the hardforechecking, fast-playing effectiveness of the Toronto approach that the home team’s first real hiccup was referee-induced. Jason Chimera put the Islanders on the board after he was inexplicably awarded a late second-period penalty shot thanks to a phantom hooking call on Leafs defenceman Matt Hunwick. That made it 3-1 heading into the second intermission, which, given the local track record, could have made for a nerve-wracking third frame.
But no such stress materialized. Instead of sitting back, the Leafs continued to attack. Auston Matthews scored on a power play to make it 4-1.
Tyler Bozak made it 5-1. Matthews buried another — his 27th of the season — off a gorgeous cross-ice feed from Connor Brown to push it to 6-1. Hunwick converted Toronto’s touchdown — their first seven-spot of the season — with a seeing-eye point shot. Doubt, if it ever crept in, had long seeped out.
As the season passed the twothirds mark on Tuesday, the rare veteran voices in the Toronto locker room pointed out what’s long been an NHL truism: The league tightens up as the playoffs approach.
In other words: Hint, hint. Scoring early, starting “on time,” as Babcock likes to say, makes life easier.
“I think good teams in this league, when they get the lead, it’s hard to score on them,” said Matt Martin, the Maple Leafs grinder who played 24 post-season games with the Islanders over the past handful of springs. “These playoff teams that have been around a long time, you give them a one-, two-goal lead and they know how to hold onto it.”
The best teams make such closeouts look easy. The Penguins have turned 23 second-intermission advantages into 23 wins. Ten teams are converting second-intermission leads into wins at an 89 per cent pace or better. The Leafs, even with Tuesday’s win, are running at 72 per cent in the category. So they’re a “C” student in a league topped by plenty of the “A” variety. But progress is progress. And Tuesday amounted to such.
“The first goal is an important goal for us,” Martin said. “At this point in the season, wins and goals and points are harder to come by. We need to get off to a good start. We haven’t been showing up on time the last few games.”
“When we have the lead, it’s something we’ve got to learn to lock down. But when we don’t have it, we have to learn to climb back in,” Martin said. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”
No, it’s not, and history suggests experience may be the only reliable teacher. Then again, in a season in which the Leafs have learned so much on the fly, who’s to say there isn’t room for growth still?