Marner magic stealing spotlight
Thievery, teamwork and a little faith paying off for soph
GLENDALE, ARIZ.— Eyeballing a quartet of Maple Leafs, walking briskly down the arena corridor in that typically bowlegged hockey kind of way, admiring the cut of their jib.
Sartorially splendid, even for a morning skate. (The slouchy-slumming Jays, perennially sweatpants-clad, could take a lesson.)
Mitch Marner is bringing up the rear, putting a skip in his step to catch up. He can’t match the likes of jumbo Freddie Andersen stride for stride. (If Marner is a six-footer, as claimed in the team’s media guide, I’m the next Merry Wife of Windsor.)
But there is indisputably a bounce in his carriage.
Following a glacially cold autumn, Marner is suddenly the hottest of Leafs: six points in four games heading into Thursday night’s tilt with the Coyotes — in which he scored midway through the first period.
He’d doubled his goal production — admittedly just to four — after scoring for only the second time in 34 games in last week’s 8-1 matinee blowout over Carolina. A career-high four-point game, that was, on the heels of a three-assist feat a week earlier. Followed up by a dominant performance against the Blue Jackets highlighted by one of his prettiest goals as a Leaf.
Lifting fans out of their seats with zigzagging rushes, flitting around defenders like a water bug, cutting and pivoting, dangling the puck on his stick, wheeling away on two-on-one forays. Marner unbound, as if emerging from swaddling, suffocating constraints, a cowl.
Everything is coming up roses and daffodils for the multi-gifted sophomore, again, and it was lousy timing that the league-mandated three-day Christmas break put a hitch in the Mitch renaissance just when he was on a roll. Though he was just as holiday excited as any other good boy. “Like any kid, go home, spend time with the family, open presents,” he said of his Noel activity.
The second-youngest Leaf (four months senior to Auston Matthews) has been dynamic and electrifying of late, an acute reversal from the frustrated slog of October and November and a banishment to the fourth line in the illogical reckoning of his coach that less ice time and lessers-killed linemates would jolt him from his year-two funk.
Funk, you say? What funk, says Marner, apparently forgetting his, um, sophomoric remark after the Leafs were blanked (first time this season) in Minneapolis this month: “It obviously sucks.”
Marner’s been electrifying of late, an acute reversal from an early slog and banishment to the fourth line
Sucks and blows. “The chances were coming beforehand too,” he pointed out Thursday. “It’s just that they weren’t going in for me, for us.’’ His reconstituted troika with James van Riemsdyk and Tyler Bozak, he means. “Obviously now it’s turning and hopefully it just keeps going that way.”
But while he’d often looked utterly confused on the ice through those long tortuous weeks, Marner continued to claim in interviews that he wasn’t stressed to the max, wasn’t clutching his stick too tight, wasn’t tossing and turning in bed, spooning out his distress. “No, what I told you then was true. Just went out, played light, had fun with it. That’s how I have to play.”
All right, we accept that Marner is irrepressible. Perhaps youth works in favour of the buoyancy factor. But this was certainly not the season he’d been anticipating after putting in a summer of hard preparatory work. (Father Paul posted a wildly popular YouTube video of Mitch executing agility skills to promote speed and balance, including one exercise that had him boing-ing off a springboard. On skates. Pivot and one-foot landing, a la Patrick Chan.)
That extraordinary balance is a key Marner asset, the reason he can duck and weave and careen through traffic, not often losing control of the puck, dictating pace; a set-up dynamo for JVR and Bozak since the line has cast off its lead weights. Even amidst his prolonged slump, Marner had racked up team-leading assist stats, at 22 through Wednesday, so on pace to equal his franchise rookie record of 42.
In that aforementioned Columbus game, the line generated 15 shots on goal. Though Marner personally still doesn’t shoot as much as he should, as much as the coaching staff has begged of him — 77 shots through the first 37 games of the 2017-18 campaign, with a miserly 5.2 shooting percentage, reflective of those barren fall months.
The line, together for all of last season, is clicking with staccato tempo nowadays.
“I just think we’re clearing pucks better in our zone,” says Marner, asked to assess what’s changed about a trio that had been pokey and flailing — until dismantled and then restored. “Me and JVR are exploding off the puck more, creating lower plays coming out of our zone to skate the puck more. If it gets chipped out we’re usually one of the first ones there. That’s the thing that we were doing last year so well. We got back to it a little bit. It’s nice to have that chemistry.
“Our line has been moving the puck well. We’re getting chances all over the ice. And now our chances are actually going in. Before, those bounces weren’t going our way.”
Athletes talk about bounces and tough luck with an almost sweet faith that these matters will even out over the course of a long season.
But an oft-overlooked statistic, when none of those Marner shots were finding the back of the net, is how adroit, how masterly, he’s been at thieving — the takeaway column, top of the Leafs chart at 32.
“Just trying to sneak up on guys,” he smiles. “Usually when you steal the puck, that’s when the chances of an odd-man run happen, stuff like that. You’ve got to work to get the puck back, create some chances coming the other way.
“I’m trying to take away angles, if you’re coming straight on at them. Or coming from behind, trying to figure out where they’re going to put their stick. Just trying to read what a guy’s going to do with it.’’
Well-read kind of guy, this Marner kid, as he pulls his watch cap down over his ears. A player with instincts that can’t be taught.
Even a structure-obsessed coach might be forced to agree on that much.
Nah.