Against Boston, good won’t be good enough
Brodie-Liljegren tandem troubling in potential playoff preview
Say this for the Maple Leafs: For most of this season, they’ve shown an admirable ability to rise to the level of their best opponents.
Put a quality team on their schedule, point out that team’s position at or near the top of the standings, and Toronto’s NHLers have tended to snap to attention.
Sure, they’ve also been known for their maddening, points-squandering tendency to lose focus against random bottom feeders. Yes, they’ve allowed the last-place Chicago Blackhawks to beat them, twice.
But take a look at their results against the top six teams in the league as measured by points percentage — the only six ahead of Toronto heading into Monday night’s slate — and the Leafs had been reliably excellent. In 13 games against the top six, Toronto had compiled 18 of a possible 26 points. That’s a 113-point pace.
“As we’ve seen over time, games against these types of teams don’t seem to be issues for us in terms of being ready and being prepared,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe was saying Monday.
To Keefe’s point, the Leafs had defeated five of the NHL’s top six teams at least once. They’d swept their season series against Western powers Winnipeg and Dallas. They were coming off a win Saturday that sealed their season series against the New York Rangers with two wins in three meetings.
Alas, heading into Monday there remained a single team in that grouping that the Leafs had yet to beat: the Boston Bruins.
And Monday’s home game didn’t change that fact, what with the previously slumping Bruins cruising to a 4-1 win — their sixth straight regular-season defeat of the Leafs.
That Boston has Toronto’s number of late is only a problem if you consider that, if the playoffs commenced now, they would be opening-round combatants. It’s only a problem because the Bruins are a historic nemesis, one Toronto hasn’t defeated in the playoffs since the 1950s. And even in this season in which many predicted Boston would finally prove vulnerable — with team captain Patrice Bergeron retiring alongside key centreman David Krecji, and the likes of Nick Foligno and Taylor Hall also leaving town — the Bruins used Monday’s win to pull eight points ahead of Toronto in the race for second place in the Atlantic Division.
For all that, it’d be fair to chalk up Monday’s outing as an out-of-character lapse in the midst of an otherwise impressive run of play by the Leafs, who’d won nine of their previous 10 games. From the opening sequence, wherein Boston centreman Pavel Zacha split Toronto defencemen T.J. Brodie and Timothy Liljegren before a breakaway save by Leafs goaltender Joseph Woll, the home team too often found itself a step behind the opportunistic visitors.
Boston’s first goal, a net-front tapin by Morgan Geekie, was a blatant botched coverage, with Toronto defencemen Morgan Rielly and Ilya Lyubushkin covering the same area to the right of Woll, this while Geekie was largely unchecked as he operated to Woll’s left.
Boston made it 2-0 when Toronto’s 21st-ranked penalty kill somehow left Zacha alone in the high slot with plenty of time to pick a corner and beat Woll.
Brodie and Liljegren, nobody’s idea of a shutdown pair, had some rough patches, including a slowfooted moment that saw them offer only token resistance to a Boston three-on-two rush that made it 3-0, this on Jake DeBrusk’s snipe from the left wing. They were also on the ice for the Boston goal that made it 4-1, when Liljegren was somehow caught unawares that Zacha was camped out in the goalmouth until the Bruin, who happened to be standing next to Liljegren, was jamming a puck past Woll.
“We just made a few too many mistakes,” said Leafs captain John Tavares. “I thought they did a little better job around their net than we did around ours … The margins are very small. It’s a good reminder and a good lesson for us.”
One game is one game. But the larger trend suggests the prospect of Brodie and Liljegren together on the ice during a crucial post-season moment would be a frightening thought, indeed. Toronto general manager Brad Treliving has until Friday afternoon to do something about it.
The Bruins, who’d lost eight of their previous 11 games, arrived in a relative state of disarray, with head coach Jim Montgomery holding a morning-skate press conference that was perhaps best described as terse.
Boston’s recent swoon, Montgomery said, amounted to “a combination of (the coaching staff ) not delivering the message well enough and the players not executing.”
Still, let’s just say Keefe was skeptical of reports of Boston’s decline.
“Boston struggling is teams barely being able to beat them in overtime or shootouts. They are in every single game,” Keefe said of the Bruins, five of whose eight most recent losses came in either overtime or a shootout. “They make it very hard to play against them.”
The Leafs, who were down 2-0 in both previous meetings and salvaged a single point in the standings out of both, had their chances to get back in Monday’s game. Bruins defenceman Brandon Carlo pulled what would have been Auston Matthews’s 54th goal of the season off the goal line in the second period. Jake McCabe rang one off the iron in the opening frame. Tavares ripped a wrister short-side shelf to make it 3-1 in the opening few minutes of the third period. The Leafs went scoreless on the power play for the fourth straight game.
“We did a lot of good things here today,” Keefe said. “But you can’t just do good things and expect to beat a team like Boston. You’ve got to do great things.”
The Leafs have a last chance at regular-season Boston-based redemption on Thursday, when the teams close out their four-game season series. Beyond that, the odds suggest there’s a more consequential Toronto-Boston matchup looming in April. Say this for the Leafs: They’re beyond aware that a team can’t vanquish its playoff demons until the playoffs.