Mid-season system change will take time
Let’s begin with a prediction. If the Maple Leafs are serious about transforming themselves from borderline playoff team to Stanley Cup contender — and clearly the fan base is expecting as much — it’s not hard to see where this season is heading.
Assuming the black hole in backup goaltending doesn’t kill the campaign, a pre-deadline trade to bolster the defensive corps has to be management’s top priority. We’ve all seen enough to know the limits of the present personnel. Morgan Rielly, a year removed from a fifth-place finish in Norris Trophy voting, isn’t his Norris-candidate self. Using Cody Ceci as a top-pairing blueliner isn’t helping matters. Tyson Barrie’s renaissance under newly inserted head coach Sheldon Keefe is a huge positive, sure, but it’s a phenomenon mostly confined to the offensive zone. And even if Travis Dermott emerges as the puck-moving force he promises to become — well, considering he’s a thirdyear NHLer joining a season midstream after missing most of the first month with a shoulder injury, it seems risky to bet on such a steep development curve.
Justin Holl is promising but untested. Jake Muzzin, the rare Leafs defenceman who sees defence as his raison d’être, can’t hold down the fort singlehandedly.
Calling up Martin Marincin, as the Maple Leafs did Tuesday, doesn’t figure to move the needle.
So it only makes sense that the Leafs eventually swap some forward depth to add to their back end with an eye toward playoff success — not to mention the future of a blue line that has precisely one NHLer under contract beyond this season. That would be Rielly, who is a bargain with a $5 million (U.S.) AAV through 2021-22. Not that the Leafs don’t have other needs, including a more bankable second-string netminder. And not that making trades for impactful defencemen is easy stuff.
In the interim, though, Toronto has been taking a sensible route.
With Keefe preparing to coach his sixth game behind an NHL bench on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, the Leafs were deep in the process of testing the upside of changing the system in lieu of the players.
It’s always tricky business, revamping a team’s style in the thick of a season. It’s like renovating a house while simultaneously living in the place. When you start felling walls and stripping floors, there’s bound to be a headache-inducing mess.
But as the Leafs headed into Tuesday, the reimagining of their defensive game plan looked more impressive than you might have figured. In their first five games under Keefe, they allowed just 10 goals against — 11 if you count an empty-netter in a loss to Buffalo. When you consider five of them came in a start by Michael Hutchinson, the No. 2 goaltender who has yet to establish himself as a reliable presence in his occasional appearances, you can understand why there’s optimism that the tactical change might be enough to stave of the need for personnel churn.
“When we get (the new system) down pat it’s going to be pretty fun to play defence, because I don’t think we’ll be playing too much of it, hopefully,” Dermott was saying this week.
Not that anyone who has watched the team under Keefe would be convinced the Maple Leafs have tossed their defensive struggles into the garbage bin for good. While the goalsagainst average has improved, the opponents’ chances haven’t exactly evaporated. Toronto’s penchant for softly serving up golden opportunities in their own zone became laughable by the end of Babcock’s tenure, sure.
A few days before the coach was fired, Muzzin, the only Stanley Cup champion among
Toronto’s player group, took aim at Toronto’s lax attitude to defensive details.
“The reality is, when you don’t care (about defence) this is what happens. You lose games,” Muzzin said.
On the same day, Muzzin expressed skepticism that a change in system would change much.
“It’s not X’s and O’s. It’s playing with passion and playing with heart,” he said.
It’s not out of the realm, mind you, that changing the X’s and O’s, along with the man scribbling on the white board, has gone some distance toward instilling a more palpable passion for keeping the puck out of the net, at least in the short term. But Toronto gave up 10.9 high-danger chances per 60 minutes at five-on-five under Babcock, according to NaturalStatTrick.com. In the first five games under Keefe, that number had only shrunk to 9.8.
Certainly the Leafs who have played under Keefe with the AHL Marlies, among them Dermott and Holl, have expressed enthusiastic buy-in to the new schematics.
“It’s definitely more tight knit,” Dermott said of Keefe’s system.
Holl and Dermott both spent time this week outlining how the new defensive strategy prioritizes packing the socalled home-plate — between the faceoff dots and below — at the potential expense of surrendering shots from the perimeter.
“We’ll probably give (opponents) more grade B chances. But the grade As will fade away quite quickly — at least that’s the idea,” Dermott said. “Our wingers are supposed to be pretty much on the hash marks, the two inside hash marks. If those two guys are there, or at least one of them, then any shot from the slot, no matter whose guy it is, there should be a guy there. That’s the basics of it.”
That’s the basics. There are intricacies beyond, of course, not to mention the matter of passion and heart — two things that have often been absent from Toronto’s defensive performances this season. But then there’s the level of difficulty of sorting out the new details on the fly.
“To just turn a switch and expect that we’re going to grasp everything and execute in games the way (Keefe has) been explaining it in morning meetings — it’s hard,” Rielly said this week. “We talked about that (Monday). We talked about what we can do better. But I think it’s going to take time to really establish what the main differences are. Off the top of my head, I think we want to hang on to the puck a little more and bring it back as opposed to pushing it forward when we don’t have to.”
Hang on to the puck. Pack home plate. Turn defence into offence, pronto. And if it’s still not looking like a Cup-worthy reinvention, cash in some chips for more qualified help.