Leafs give Kaskisuo a shot,
GM says rookie goalie has earned the chance to take the backup job
As he was walking through the Maple Leafs dressing room at the Ford Performance Centre, goalie Kasimir Kaskisuo saw one of the team’s equipment managers gathering his bags.
“My heart kind of sunk,” said Kaskisuo.
That’s because as a career minor leaguer, now 26 years of age, he’s continually braced for bad news. But really, all that was happening was that the equipment was being gathered — along with everyone else’s — to be transferred to the Leafs dressing room at Scotiabank Arena ahead of Friday’s visit by the Boston Bruins.
“I’m just ‘day at a time,’ ” said Kaskisuo.
If all goes according to plan — Mike Babcock’s take-it-or-leave-it edict on goaltending usage — Kaskisuo will make his first NHL start Saturday night in Pittsburgh against the Sidney Crosby-less Penguins.
General manager Kyle Dubas praised Kaskisuo, who has spent four years in the Leafs’ system and has not always been at the top of the depth chart, but has managed to play his way onto the NHL roster with a 6-1-1 record and .928 save percentage with the Marlies.
He has played so well for the past year or so that Dubas says he isn’t in the market for a veteran backup — after Michael Hutchinson was waived and demoted — because he wants to see what Kaskisuo can do at the NHL level.
“He’s earned the opportunity and we’ll let him let him run with it here, and then evaluate from that point,” said Dubas.
That compliment was music to Kaskisuo’s ears.
“That’s awesome,” the goalie said. “That’s how I wanted to get my opportunity: to earn it, not some emergency and injuries and all that.
“I mean, it’s been a long road. It’s been a long process and things are paying off. So just trying to live the dream one day at a time.” He said his game turned around last year, after the Leafs recalled him as a backup for six games.
“There was a lot of things going on at that time in my life,” said Kaskisuo. “I had a tough start to the season with the Marlies. I was hurt for a couple months. And then my daughter (Fox) was born and I got called up, so that was just the shakeup that I needed, and things started to roll from there.”
The organization signed Kaskisuo — a Finn who’d played two seasons at University of Minnesota-Duluth — in the spring of 2015. He played for the Marlies, Orlando of the ECHL, and was even lent to another organization the year the Marlies went with Garret Sparks and Calvin Pickard to win the Calder Cup. The other goalies who have backed up Frederik Andersen before Kaskisuo: Jhonas Enroth, Curtis McElhinney, Antoine Bibeau, Sparks, Pickard and Hutchinson.
Under Babcock, the backup plays the second of back-toback games, so his job is not easy with a tired team in front of him. Only McElhinney really thrived in the role, with Hutchinson the latest casualty.
“With Hutch, I don’t think we played particularly well in front of him for stretches and made it difficult on him,” said Dubas.
“It sucks for him because we feel we have to make a move and give Kasimir a chance, because of the way that he played with the Marlies. We’ll see how it goes here now. We don’t want to run Fred into the ground. At the same time, if he’s in a groove we want him to continue to establish that.”
Kaskisuo said he never doubted this dream would come true.
“I’m a late bloomer, I like to think,” he said. “Probably at some point, it was never supposed to happen to me, but I just stuck with it. Age starts to (be a factor), but for goalies, later is normal. So yeah, like, I like to think it’s right on schedule.”