Leafs beat playoff drive heat
Ending slide at five helps but hard part has only just begun
Mike Babcock was asked what he learned from his decade with the Detroit Red Wings, and he took a while to decide. He talked about individual games by Nicklas Lidstrom and Kris Draper and his current boss, Brendan Shanahan, that made him think about things differently. He meandered a little. He arrived at his point.
“Maybe the thing that I learned the most there: when I arrived I thought you had to be ready for the game at nine in the morning,” said Babcock. “I didn’t know that if you were ready for the game and wore yourself out all day you had no energy at night. So what I learned from the best players was they could be watching their son playing on TV three minutes before the drop of the puck, and be ready to go when the puck was dropped. How’s that?”
Sure. There is a strong school of thought in the Leafs organization that judges players by how they play when the pressure is highest, and the hockey is hardest. That’s how you win playoff games, and Cups. That’s what this organization wants.
Detroit wasn’t really a test, or shouldn’t have been. Sure, the Leafs entered Tuesday’s game with five wins in their previous 18 since beating the Red Wings on Jan. 25, and were ninth in the East by points percentage. And yes, the Wings are now not-good-at-hockeytown. But the skid is the kind of thing that can tempt you into viewing these Leafs very differently. Before the game Babcock was asked about Morgan Rielly’s struggles.
“I think he’s like a lot of us. When you’ve got a swagger to your game and you’re playing real fast and things are going real good, you don’t think about anything. You’re just doing what you do,” said Babcock.
“I think he’s probably got himself thinking a little bit. Just steady on the rudder here. Do what you do. Understand the detail and the structure pro- tects the individual, and do all those things and get prepared. But let’s be loose and driving at game time and have some fun.”
And then the Leafs scored on their second shift, off a Mitch Marner steal; James van Riemsdyk, who was in a 14game goal-less streak, scored a second goal five minutes later on a power play: six minutes into the second, it was 3-0 and the Red Wings were barely touching the puck.
So of course it was 3-2 a minute into the third, and the game was a test again. This team has led heading into the third more than all but two other teams, and . . . well, as Babcock put it, “here we go again, we’ve all seen it.” In that moment, how does Babcock keep them loose?
“Well obviously you don’t,” said Babcock, “because you’re watching it just like me. I mean, I got all these great things I say, but none of them seem to work.”
But they held off the collapse. They made mistakes, but they didn’t cost. A 3-2 win, and escape. Exhale.
“Any time you’re struggling, usually the first one you win isn’t pretty anyway,” said Babcock. “So it was pretty early, but it wasn’t pretty late.
“Play the game. When you’re loose and driving, you’re flying, and you’re on top of the other team, and you look fast. And when you’re tight, you look slow. That’s just the reality of being in the league and learning how to win, and expecting to win every night and learning what you need to do to win.”
“You don’t want to make mistakes when you’re up with a one-goal lead,” said Marner, “but at the same time, I think we’ve just got to play the way we want to play.”
The skid had not been the result of a team-wide breakdown. No, often it was the big mistake, the whoops. The Gardiner, if you wanted to be mean. Hockey lives in terror of the mistake more than it yearns for the great attacking play. The trick is managing one without the other. On this night, they got away without the last one.
“I think when you start the game, you don’t know what shift’s going to turn the game,” said Babcock. “Is it going to be the last one, with 1:20 left, when they shoot it in your net and cost you the game? Is it going to be the first shift of the second or third period when you took a penalty at the end because you didn’t get off the ice on time and boom? So you don’t know what shift is going to turn the game, so be ready for your shift. Play one, come back, take a deep breath, a little drink of water, and be ready for the next one.”
The Leafs believe Auston Matthews — who wasn’t great on this night — and Marner can rise to the occasion. The rest? They’re watching. One thing Babcock loved about coaching Henrik Zetterberg in Detroit was how he played when it mattered.
Babcock said of the younger players in Detroit, “They see him train and they understand how competitive he is when the game’s on the line. The other thing is, when things go bad in the game, he goes and makes a play. So it’s not what you say, it’s what you do in the big moments.”
The biggest moments so far are here.