Impressive start not smoke and mirrors
Twenty-three games into the season and already looking down at their competition from high atop the NHL’s all-Canadian division, the Maple Leafs are off to the best start in the franchise’s centuryplus history.
And this being Toronto, you can understand the instinctual skepticism that is bound to bleed into the usual euphoria. Sure, it’s true the Leafs are eight points clear of the second-place Oilers after Monday night’s second straight shutout win over Connor McDavid et al. And it’s also true Toronto has banked 36 of a possible 46 points in the standings to date — an unparalleled sprint out of the gate, even in the team’s Stanley Cup-winning seasons of yore.
Still, this is a hockey capital haunted by the ghosts of umpteen promising beginnings gone awry. The collective memory is long. So while it’s impossible not to be impressed, it’s also difficult to be wholly convinced. As Paul Coffey, the Hall of Fame defenceman who grew up in the GTA as a Leafs fans, said on the FAN 590 morning show Tuesday: “I need to see more.”
Considering the Leafs haven’t won a playoff series since 2004, he was only stating the hard truth. The Leafs will go into Wednesday’s game against the Oilers playing at a 128point pace in a theoretical 82-game season. But the truth is they could be playing at 164-point pace, en route to going undefeated, and there would still be questions this team couldn’t possibly answer until the playoffs.
For some, at least one of those questions revolve around a regular-season format that requires an asterisk of sorts. This is, after all, a one-off pandemic-required schedule in which the Leafs won’t play a single game against 77 per cent of the teams in the NHL. And there are those looking north of the border and passing it off as something less than toprank hockey.
“The North Division is just smoke and mirrors,” John Scott, the former enforcer and unlikely all-star, said on his “Dropping the Gloves” podcast recently. “It’s just the ‘Wizard
of Oz’ where everybody thinks it’s this great show, and all these teams are great. But the more we see them play and we see behind the curtain, we see that these guys aren’t that good.”
You can expect more of that line of chatter as the season progresses. And more of this.
“This division is run and gun,” Scott said. “All they try to do is score goals. It’s fun and it’s great and entertaining, but what are you going to do once you get to the playoffs and you get to the final four? If you’re Toronto, what are you going to do (in the playoffs) when you’re not used to being played that hard?”
This season makes it essentially
impossible to compare teams whose paths never cross beyond using eye-test measures and pure conjecture. So maybe it’s true that the best teams in the league reside elsewhere, perhaps in Tampa or Boston or Las Vegas or Colorado. And maybe it’s not. There’s no way to tell until the divisions finally mix in the Stanley Cup semifinals.
But here’s what’s difficult to argue. The Leafs, thanks to roster tweaks by GM Kyle Dubas and the deft touch of coach Sheldon Keefe, are doing what they said they were going to do. They’re taking the kind of defensively responsible hockey that’s long been necessary to succeed in the playoffs
and making it their regularseason standard.
Last year, when on a lot of regular-season nights they couldn’t seem to be bothered to care about such pesky details, they ranked a dismal 26th in goals-against per game. Heading into Tuesday’s games, they ranked third.
And as much as it’s easy enough to point out that the Canadian teams are playing a higher-scoring style than what exists in the other three divisions, maybe that’s at least partly because the Canadian teams are stacked with some of the league’s highest-scoring talent. You’ll probably hear it from now until June, how Toronto, or any Canadian team, surely isn’t the equal of the Lightning or the Golden Knights or the Blues. But who’s making a case McDavid isn’t the most electric player on the planet (and a player the Leafs have blanked on the scoresheet in two straight games)? Who’s arguing Auston Matthews, who was leading the race for the Rocket Richard trophy by four goals heading into Tuesday’s slate despite missing three games to injury this season, isn’t the heir apparent to Alex Ovechkin as the preeminent goal scorer on the planet? It’s a simple fact that since he arrived in the league in 2016, nobody, not even Washington’s No. 8, has scored more goals at even strength. Which isn’t exactly some fluke of divisional disparity.
Sure, the Leafs are dominating their Canadian brethren with a high-scoring attack; only the Lightning were on pace for more goals heading into Tuesday. But the Leafs also rank as the best defensive team in the division. They can only play their schedule. And so far, they’re flat-out dominating it.
It’s not as though everything has fallen their way. They have already played three games without Matthews, who was back at practice on Tuesday and expected to play Wednesday. They’ve gone unbeaten while outscoring their opponents, in all three instances the Oilers, a combined 11-2. They’ve played seven of their 23 games without No. 1 goaltender Frederik Andersen in the crease. They’re an unlikely 6-1 with a relief goaltender at work. Considering Toronto’s recent history of backup goaltending problems, maybe that’s not sustainable. You could have cashed some long-odds tickets on Michael Hutchinson and Jack Campbell registering back-to-back shutouts against the Oilers. And maybe more backup heroics won’t be necessary; Keefe said Tuesday that Andersen had a “positive” practice and could be ready for action in Wednesday’s game, when Campbell will not be available on account of a reaggravated leg injury.
We’ll need to see more, sure. We’ve only just begun March. The playoffs won’t be upon us until the second week of May. But even if it’s too early to be convinced, it’s impossible to watch the Maple Leafs and not be impressed.