Reaves offers hangover remedy
Maple Leafs winger Ryan Reaves has been to the Stanley Cup playoffs often enough to know how to handle losing the opener of a seven-game series.
“Short memory,” he said Sunday at the team’s hotel. “You talk about it today, you look over what was going right and what was going wrong, you make the adjustments and you get rid of it.
“You’ve got to forget about that game and get to work.”
But he’s also been to the Stanley Cup playoffs often enough to know you can’t make the kind of mistake he made early in the first period on Saturday night, leading to Boston’s first goal in a 5-1 loss to the Bruins at TD Garden.
After Leafs defenceman Joel Edmundson pinched, Reaves tried to hit Boston’s Pat Maroon instead of covering for Edmundson. Maroon took the hit but made the play, launching his teammates on a successful two-on-one and the Bruins never looked back.
Reaves owned the mistake: “I doubled down on a hit there ... The D (Edmundson) was pinching. I think I reacted too slowly to what (Edmundson) was doing and just got caught.”
This is Reaves’ 13th straight appearance in the post-season, the longest active streak in the NHL. (Goalie Marc-André Fleury was at 17 in a row before his Minnesota Wild missed the post-season.) Reaves hasn’t lost the faith of Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe.
“He’s got lots of confidence,” Keefe said.
“He’s been through it a lot. He’s played over 100 playoff games; those experiences are important. And probably even more important than that, he’s really got his own game in order and has a very clear role on the team, has the ability to speak up and talk to the group. He was a very vocal guy yesterday.”
It helps, of course, that the fourth line — centred by David Kämpf, with Reaves and Connor Dewar on the wings — scored the Leafs’ only goal. Outside of the early mistake, they were good.
“Those guys have been excellent,” said Keefe.
“Our game plan going in, and the things that we talked about as a group that were really important to us, those guys went out and they executed it well.
“Yeah, they got a little overexcited with the contact early on the first shift there, but those guys worked extremely well together. They forechecked. They got chances. They scored a big goal. That line has a very clear identity and they’re sticking with it.”
It’s worth noting that the players general manager Brad Treliving signed last summer specifically for their playoff prowess were among the team’s worst offenders in Game 1. Tyler Bertuzzi took a penalty; Max Domi took two, one leading to a goal.
Domi’s second infraction — slashing Brad Marchand on the faceoff after the Bruins had just scored a power-play goal — was so egregious that Keefe talked about it postgame and continued Sunday.
“We don’t want to take that (penalty) off the faceoff,” said Keefe. “I love Max’s initiative and his competitiveness and the physicality and the passion that he brought to the game. He just crossed the line. It was probably more a reflection of the fact that we were already down three at that point.”
They professed a quiet confidence going into Monday’s Game 2. Last year, they lost Game 1 at home to the Tampa Bay Lightning and went on to win the series in six.
“We’ve done it all year,” said Reaves.
“We’ve had stretches where we couldn’t win a couple games, we bounced back and strung a lot together. We’ve had games where we got absolutely waxed and came back the next day really strong. So I’m not worried about the bounce back; It’s going to be there.”
Treliving said the playoffs should be fun, and having a guy like Reaves who can loosen up the dressing room helps when the team is down.
“It’s almost the Hakuna Matata kind of motto,” the GM said. “You can’t be worried about what happened in the past. You’ve just got to look forward.”