Play-in will test Dubas’s faith in Keefe
It figures to be a jarring transition. In a week from Sunday, the Maple Leafs will be transported from the strange existence of this pandemic summer to the familiar crush of the Stanley Cup cauldron.
As always, there will be pressure on everyone. The core four forwards who earn about 50 per cent of a suddenly flat salary cap will be nitpicked as usual. And general manager Kyle Dubas, who memorably pronounced himself stumped by his team’s Jekyll and Hyde inconsistencies as recently as February’s trade deadline, will take his share of guff if this team built around those golden boys doesn’t succeed.
But, for my money, nobody will be under more pressure in the best-of-five play-in series against the Columbus Blue Jackets than head coach Sheldon Keefe.
As much as these unprecedented conditions make everything a bit of a coin flip, the Maple Leafs are supposed to win. At the very least, they clearly own the superior collection of talent, more speed and skill in a speed-skill sport, and a goaltender with plenty of playoff experience, compared to a pair of Columbus netminders who have not played a single post-season game. That means if the Blue Jackets manage to prevail, a lot of Columbus’s success will likely be heaped on head coach John Tortorella.
Tortorella, he of the famously gruff press-conference manners, is one of the favourites to win the Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year. And that’s only right given that, when the pandemic hit, he had guided his team into a playoff spot despite an off-season that brought the free-agent departures of Hart Trophy nominee Artemi Panarin and two-time Vezina winner Sergei Bobrovsky.
Getting beat by a coach who adapted to the loss of a star like Panarin — this with the likes of Auston Matthews and John Tavares at your service — wouldn’t exactly be a great advertisement for Dubas’s roster construction. And it would definitely cast aspersions on Dubas’s faith in Keefe, who replaced Mike Babcock in November and who will be presiding over a bench in a Stanley Cup tournament for the first time. Lose to Tortorella and you’re bound to be told you’ve been out-coached. We know this because we’ve seen this movie before, and rather recently.
Maybe you’ll remember what Tampa captain Steven Stamkos said after the Blue Jackets swept the Lightning in last year’s playoffs: “They had the game plan … If we had the answers, we would have done it.”
And surely you’ll understand what Stamkos was essentially saying. Players don’t draw up game plans. It was Tortorella who had all the right answers. More than a year later, Lightning coach Jon Cooper comes into these playoffs still dogged by legitimate questions about his tactical acumen, not to mention his ability to get certain players, particularly Nikita Kucherov, to buy into his vision.
Getting players to buy what you’re selling, of course, is one of the essential skills of the coach’s trade. And, on Wednesday, Keefe was effectively paying homage to Tortorella for his achievement in that elusive art.
“(The Blue Jackets) have belief in how they play and what they’re capable of doing, which was only reinforced by their experience in the playoffs last year,” Keefe said. “They have a lot of belief in what they do and who they are as a team and, as a result, they make it really hard on you.”
When the series begins Aug. 2, it will be a study in opposites. The Leafs define themselves with their offence, the Blue Jackets with defence. Columbus’s leading scorer this season, Pierre-Luc Dubois, had a mere 49 points. Toronto’s fourth-leading scorer, William Nylander, had 59. Columbus’s top two goal scorers, Oliver Bjorkstrand and defenceman Zach Werenski, combined for 41 goals. Matthews had 47 on his own.
When it comes to the standings, mind you, both teams compiled an identical 81 points in 70 games. And while the Leafs have built a reputation for maddening inconsistency — for sprinkling in the occasional masterful performance amid a week of stinkers — the Blue Jackets are known for the unflashy predictability of a relentless forecheck and a risk-minimizing counterattack.
As veteran Toronto centre Jason Spezza said of the Blue Jackets on Wednesday: “They’re a team we know what to expect.”
And therein lies Keefe’s challenge: To find a way to make the Leafs a little more machine-like, a little less mercurial, without robbing it of its explosive strengths. To find a way to get his team to believe in a brand of the game that can advance in the playoffs for the first time since 2004.
“We have to figure out a way to create offence while not giving up too much defensively,” Morgan Rielly, the No. 1 defenceman, said Wednesday. “It’s about balance. We want to be offensive. We want to play our game … (But) it’s a work in progress. Once the playoffs start, we’ll make changes on the fly.”
As if to highlight the philosophical gulf that separates the organizations, Keefe has spent training camp attempting to prepare his team to be even less predictable. He has experimented with plenty of line combinations, including the nuclear option of Matthews, Tavares and Mitch Marner. He’s given 18-year-old rookie Nick Robertson a quality look on the third line alongside Alex Kerfoot and Kasperi Kapanen. He’s continued to be the anti-Babcock, who often seemed to view change more as an admission of weakness than an examination of possibilities.
“You need to shake things up. So I think just getting used to playing with different players is a good thing and something that can help us down the line,” Hyman said. “You always want to have different options and different looks, and I think that Sheldon is just exploring those options. Because things don’t always go smoothly, right?”
Given that Hyman asked that question to a Zoom audience of Toronto reporters, we’ll assume it was rhetorical. Things don’t always go smoothly, indeed. So it’s incumbent on a successful coach to instill some faith that, when the pressure’s on, he might have an answer to an important question or two.