Becoming the kings of five-on-five
Zach Hyman points the way while the Maple Leafs hopped on the TTC on Thursday.
Though they’re millionaires accustomed to travel in catered charter jets and private luxury automobiles, the Maple Leafs went into communityoutreach mode on Thursday.
A bunch of them hopped the subway to an 11 a.m. outdoor practice at Nathan Phillips Square. All of them, including goaltender Frederik Andersen, made the trek wearing full equipment. Apparently nobody told them helmets and goalie paddles are really only necessary at rush hour.
“Sometimes it can be a full mugging, so you’ve got to be careful,” explained Maple Leafs coach Mike Babcock, speaking of the perils of public transport.
Babcock, who described himself as only an occasional partaker in mass transit, mostly prefers his daily commute to practice in a jumbo pickup truck. So as the Maple Leafs made their journey on the Yonge-University line toward city hall, they were accompanied by what forward Zach Hyman described as “a bunch of policemen.” As Babcock famously opined a while back: This team’s toughness is its power play. If that fails, as it often has this season, it’s nice to have armed backup.
Babcock was asked if he received any advice from the unwashed en route to the skate.
“I didn’t get any advice,” said the coach. “They were smart enough to know.”
Smart enough to know he wouldn’t listen, is what he meant. And why shouldn’t the 55-year-old bench boss be so sure of himself? The Maple Leafs have extracted nine of a possible 10 points from their most recent five games, a stretch that’s included wins over Washington and Pittsburgh. And while they’re about to embark on the challenge of their longest road trip of the season — six games over 10 days and four time zones — the Maple Leafs have played better on the road than at home this season. So certainly there are reasons to be bullish on their long-term prospects.
To name one: Heading into Thursday’s slate of games, the Maple Leafs led the NHL in five-on-five goals. That number explains how, despite a power play that’s slumped badly, they remain one of the most potent offensive teams in the league.
In the past 20 years, only one NHL team has scored more than 200 fiveon-five goals in a regular season — the 2009-10 Washington Capitals, who scored 208.
This year’s Maple Leafs are on pace to score 213. Now, that’s in part because the NHL is experiencing an intriguing offensive explosion, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the clutch-and-grab crackdown after the 2005 Shanahan Summit.
It’s also because the Leafs are undeniably good. Heading into Thursday, Toronto’s John Tavares was leading the league in five-on-five goals with 25. He and linemate Mitch Marner ranked third and sixth, respectively, in five-on-five points. Toronto, which ranks third in the league with a plus-40 goal differential, is plus-36 at five-on-five.
How are they doing it? There are signs they’re slowly morphing into the team Babcock has always wanted them to be. As Mike Kelly, the hockey-stats analyst, pointed out on Twitter in the lead-up to Toronto’s 5-4 win over the Senators on Wednesday night, since Dec. 1 the Maple Leafs are leading the NHL in even-strength offensive zone puck possession — spending about 5:36 a game rolling around in their opponents’ end. A number like that surely pleases the coach. The Leafs may not be anyone’s idea of a physically tough team. But leading the league in offensivezone time, even if it’s over a sample of a little more than two months, suggests they’re figuring out how to play the “heavy” style Babcock favours.
“Being heavy isn’t getting on a scale and measuring yourself; it’s a state of mind,” Babcock said back in early January. “It’s heavy on offence. It’s having the puck. It’s getting the puck back all the time. It’s checking it back. It’s putting your work in front of your skill. It’s being determined offensively, not coming down, having a rush and being one-and-done. It’s multiple-shot shifts. It’s having some jam.”
There are more than a few reasons to believe the Leafs are discovering the merits of those urgings. Maybe it’s the influence of Tavares, an experienced hybrid of prodigious skill and punishment-taking ruggedness. As Kelly’s site, ThePointHockey.com, will tell you, Tavares led the NHL in shots from the slot with 145 heading into Thursday. And if the Leafs, at their worst, can be accused of avoiding heavy traffic by hanging out on the perimeter, this season they’re finding plenty of opportunities from in close. As of Thursday afternoon, Toronto ranked second in shots from the inner slot, averaging 8.5 a game.
The Maple Leafs are still a potent team off the rush, of course, as Wednesday’s giveand-go clinic of a run-and-gun win underlined. To Babcock’s point, spending time in the offensive zone wears an opponent down, which only heightens Toronto’s usual speed advantage as a game wears on.
If Toronto could only get its power play working, they’d really be on to something. Since the day in early December when Babcock declared “our toughness is our power play,” only the lowly Ducks and Blues had scored fewer goals with the man advantage than the Leafs as of Thursday afternoon. Toronto had converted on just 14 per cent of its opportunities over that two-month span.
In the lead-up to Thursday’s practice there wasn’t a subway commuter brave enough to circumvent the police escort and offer Babcock an antidote to the special-teams putridness, although the coach acknowledged he’s accustomed to fielding unsolicited solutions to the Maple Leafs’ woes.
“No question about it,” said the coach. “But I often ask the guy (offering advice), ‘What do you do for a living? If you want me to come by and fix your company, I’m happy to do that in a few days, too.’ ”
As it happens, we in the thriving fish-wrap industry may or may not be in the market for a turnaround specialist. Excuse us if we wait to call in Babcock until his team makes a trip to city hall via ticker-tape parade.