Confidence is what’s called for now
Leafs have to believe in themselves against the Canadiens as much as prognosticators do
It was one game on a stomach-turning night that saw the bulk of the Maple Leafs’ worry directed toward the hospital bed of team captain John Tavares.
But if we’re getting back to the small matter of winning hockey games — and the teammates who have been talking and texting with Tavares told reporters on Friday that they’ll be playing for their captain as he recovers from what the team has described as a concussion — there were at least a few details of Thursday’s Game 1 loss that had to concern Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe.
It wasn’t just the 2-1 loss to the Canadiens. It wasn’t simply the notion that Toronto will now have to win four straight games to avoid a Game 6 in front of actual fans, albeit a limitedcapacity crowd in Montreal’s notoriously energetic Bell Centre. It wasn’t just the perplexing woes of a skillstacked Toronto power play that, after surrendering Paul Byron’s short-handed winner on Thursday has spent its past 30 games somehow giving up more goals against (six) than it has managed to score (five).
More than any of that, the thing that had to bother Keefe was the all-round uneasiness his team displayed for the bulk of the hockey game, a dominant run of play in the second period excepted.
It wasn’t simply the pall that was cast after Tavares was kneed in the head by Corey Perry midway through the opening frame. Toronto looked discombobulated long before that, from the moment starting goaltender Jack Campbell fell on his keister as he attempted to play a puck in the opening moments.
Suddenly it didn’t matter that, in the lead-up to the series, the overwhelming consensus had the Maple Leafs as the better team. For a lot of Game 1, it didn’t look like they believed it.
They played for long stretches like they were out of their element, even though they were playing at home. They got caught on ill-timed line changes that changed the game, Byron blowing by the flat-footed Rasmus Sandin not long after he had hopped the boards. They made too many careless turnovers, the tortoise-footed Joe Thornton coughing up no fewer than two offensive-blueline giveaways that led to Montreal goals. Though they finished the regular season as the leastpenalized team in the North Division,
they took too many dumb penalties
Keefe didn’t sugar-coat the unnecessarily harried nature of too many of his team’s worst moments.
“There was a little bit of a sense of panic,” is how he put it. And while he was specifically explaining two of the three puck-over-glass minors his team incurred — brain cramps by Mitch Marner and William Nylander — he might as well have lumped in any number of inexcusable errors.
If there was panic, the only reasonable followup question was simple: Panic about what? The opponent isn’t exactly the Gretzky-Messier Oilers. It’s the scoring-challenged, slow-onthe-back-end Canadiens, from whom the Leafs earned 15 of a possible 20 points in the standings in 10 regular-season meetings, this while running up a plus-10 goal differential.
And as for the spectre of Montreal goaltender Carey Price shattering the hopes of the best Leafs team in a generation by stealing the series? Price was otherworldly in Game 1, no doubt. But you can humanize him pretty easily with a quick glance at his recent record. Outside of last season’s win over the Penguins in a pandemic-bubble best-offive, the 33-year-old hasn’t helmed a team out of the first round in a half-dozen years.
His career playoff winning percentage is an underwhelming .463. In other words, he’s been dominant in one victory. But speaking of pressure … Price has to win a whole lot more so as not to be seen as a guy coming off a mediocre regular season that made his $10.5-million (U.S.) annual cap hit, on the books for five more seasons, look like an albatross.
If you’re Keefe, you’re hoping Friday’s practice was a moment to get a grip on the notso-scary reality, not to mention a deep belly breath to calm those obvious nerves. Rocket Richard winner Auston Matthews seemed to have things in perspective.
“You can’t win a series in one game,” Matthews said. “We have to up our intensity. All of us have to step up and replace John.”
Not that Keefe wasn’t acknowledging the need for adjustments. If Friday’s practice lines were to be believed, Game 2 figures to see Tavares’s spot as second-line centre occupied by second-line winger Nick Foligno, who was flanked at the brief skate by William Nylander and Game 1 scratch Alex Galchenyuk.
“Nick’s played a lot of centre,” Keefe said, “and we don’t have an abundance of options there.”
The other obvious option to fill Tavares’s spot, Alex Kerfoot, figures to be busy centring the third line after Keefe’s choice for that job in Game 1, tradedeadline acquisition Riley Nash, flopped in his Toronto debut, the centrepiece of Toronto’s worst line of the night. Kerfoot will be joined by Ilya Mikheyev and another Game 1 press-box sitter, Pierre Engvall. While Keefe had hoped to make his third line a shutdown defensive unit — ergo the nod to Nash, at his best a master of the low-event shift — the abrupt switch is an acknowledgment that more offence will be required with Tavares, the team’s third-leading point producer this season, out indefinitely. Engvall scored a goal in four of his most recent five outings. Galchenyuk managed a point in five of his most recent seven.
“Goals are going to be hard to come by,” Keefe said. “Both (Engvall and Galchenyuk) bring degrees of speed and skill … The dynamics of our group change when John’s not in.”
That’s undoubtedly true. What Keefe needs to hope is that the dynamics of his group haven’t changed because there are players who are too panicked to meet the moment, or maybe too scarred by playoff failures past. Certainly Sandin and Thornton looked out of their league at times in Game 1. But Keefe said it was unfair to point the finger at those two specifically; though their worst moments were highlight-reel turning points, they had their positive ones, too.
“We’ve got to remain confident in our group, the guys who have gotten us here,” Keefe said.
It’s good to see Keefe express his conviction that he’s coaching the better team, because he is. Now would be the moment for the Maple Leafs to take a deep belly breath, calm those nerves, and start playing like their coach’s faith isn’t misplaced.