Loose change is currency of the Cup
That’s how Matthews describes in-close goals, something Toronto must get better at
The Maple Leafs were built to be an explosive offensive machine. And, by a lot of measures, they are.
Since Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner ushered in new era of possibilities in Leafsland in 2016, Toronto’s NHLers have scored more regular-season goals than any team other than the Tampa Bay Lightning, the gold-standard franchise of the current era. With that kind of firepower in Toronto’s fold, nothing ought to be impossible. Certainly no opponents’ lead ought to be safe.
Which raises a question: Why don’t the Leafs mount more thirdperiod comebacks?
In the 17 games in which they’ve trailed going into the third period this season, the Leafs have managed just two wins. Only the offence-challenged Calgary Flames have fewer such victories.
Now, no one’s saying the inability to mount late-game charges is some kind of fatal flaw. The best route to being an elite regular-season team is to take a lead into the third period and hold it. And in piling up victories in that fashion, the Leafs ranked fourth in the league behind only Boston, Carolina and Colorado heading into Wednesday.
Staging third-period rallies is a low-percentage proposition for even the best teams. Still, some clubs have knack for doing it far more often than Toronto. Going back to the beginning of the Matthews-Marner era in 2016-17 and heading into Wednesday, the highscoring Lightning lead the league with 42 wins in games they trailed after two periods. Toronto has 22 such wins, which ranks 29th.
Given how Tampa and Toronto both have offences that are so demonstrably potent, the disparity doesn’t necessarily add up. Tuesday’s loss to the Islanders was another case in point. The Leafs, down 3-1 at the second intermission, made it 3-2 early in the third period. But their attempt at pulling off a rare come-from-behind victory soon backfired with a series of turnovers and mistakes that allowed the Islanders to reel off an easy 7-2 win.
Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said the problem in Tuesday’s loss was twofold. Part of it came down to that occasional penchant for giving away games with untimely miscues — a recurring theme that reared its ugly head on notable brain cramps by Timothy Liljegren and Marner that led to Islanders goals. And part of it, too, came down to an otherwise high-scoring team’s inability to generate offence when it needed it most. Keefe chalked the latter up to Toronto’s struggle to operate effectively in the “dirty areas” close to the net when the Islanders played a conservative defensive style that encouraged the Leafs to overpass the puck unthreateningly around the perimeter.
“Consistently, we didn’t challenge enough to the inside,” Keefe said. “We need to be able to generate more against (the Islanders) on the inside. Otherwise you’re not scoring against that guy.”
“That guy”— Islanders goaltender Ilya Sorokin — is an elite netminder whose worst moments come when opponents create plenty of netfront traffic with an eye toward jamming in pucks from the doorstep. The same can be said about the No. 1 goaltender for Toronto’s presumptive first-round playoff opponent, Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Which probably speaks to why GM Kyle Dubas said he tailored a decent chunk of an extensive personnel makeover before the March 3 trade deadline around improving the team’s ability to score from in close.
In the newly arrived forward trio of Ryan O’Reilly, Noel Acciari and Sam Lafferty, Dubas said he valued the fact that they have all proven “that they can score, and they can score in tight to the net, where we are going to have to find a way, and haven’t found a way in key moments in the past.”
So far, the changes haven’t yielded obvious results. Since the trade deadline, Toronto is a mediocre 43-1 heading into Thursday’s game against the Panthers in Florida. As for creating offence closer to the net, they are 27th in high-danger chance share, meaning they’re giving up plenty more than they’re creating.
Part of the problem is that O’Reilly, the centrepiece of the deadline haul, played in just one of those post-deadline games before suffering a broken finger that continues to sideline him. Still, on Wednesday, Matthews acknowledged to reporters after practice in Elmont, N.Y., that, as the playoffs approach, the Leafs need to put more of an emphasis on commanding real estate and creating offence near the opposing goalmouth.
“I think attacking the net more and just having a little bit more of an inside presence, and not being too perimeter,” Matthews said. “As you get into late in the season and playoffs, obviously teams play extremely tight. So I think just making sure we’ve got guys that are in those areas, so when we do deliver pucks we’ve got some numbers there and can maybe bang home some pucks and find the loose change there.”
Call it loose change, sure, but it’s often the currency of the Stanley Cup cauldron. And maybe there’s some rough correlation to Toronto’s inability to mount third-period comebacks and its lack of success in big post-season moments.
When opponents play “extremely tight,” to use Matthews’s phrase, an otherwise high-scoring Toronto team clearly finds it difficult to score.
They also find it difficult not to take the kind of gambles that lead to opponent counterstrikes. Which could speak to why, in Toronto’s four most recent winner-take-all playoff losses, the Leafs have scored a combined total of three goals while giving up 13.
That’s three Game 7s against Tampa, Montreal and Boston, plus a Game 5 against Columbus. Against Tampa, Boston and Columbus, the Leafs were down a goal heading into the third period. Against Montreal, they were down two. In all four instances, the Leafs failed to mount the rally that could have helped change the post-season narrative of the Matthews-Marner era.
As another opportunity for some modicum of post-season redemption comes closer, it only makes sense that Keefe is urging his players to get closer to the net. Whether they’ll find enough loose change to significantly transform their playoff fortunes might turn out to be the money question.