DAVID COOPER / TORONTO STAR Order this photo
Leaf Phil Kessel opens the scoring, beating Devils goalie Cory Schneider on a third-period power play at the Air Canada Centre Friday night.
By: Dave Feschuk Sports Columnist, Published on Fri Nov 08 2013
As the Maple Leafs departed for Boston on Friday night, they were flying toward a date with their demons. Saturday’s matchup at the TD Garden, of course, will mark the first time the Leafs have visited Causeway Street since the infamous Collapse.
You remember the grim details of that first-round Game 7 plummet from the perspective of the visitors. Three-goal lead. Third period. Stopped skating. Started panicking. Lost their ticket to the Eastern semis in OT.
Most of six months later, the Leafs have gone to great lengths to downplay the psychological scar tissue that still lingers around that competitive wounding. In most of the narratives that have been written in the lead-up to the big game against the Bruins, Toronto has stuck to a familiar plotline. Saturday’s game isn’t about getting revenge. It’s about coming up with a good performance at a moment when coach Randy Carlyle has begun to openly question the underpinnings of his team’s early-season success.
“I don’t think we’re approaching this game the way everybody thinks we would be — coming out for vengeance,” Cody Franson, the Toronto defenceman, said. “Obviously we want to do well and win that game. But it’s the process for us right now. We have to focus on playing better as a team.”
Um, about that. Friday night’s 2-1 shootout win over the New Jersey Devils convinced nobody that the Leafs absorbed the back-to-the-fundamentals message that had been incessantly delivered by head coach Randy Carlyle during a rare open week of practice. Friday’s circumstances favoured the Leafs in a zillion ways. Toronto hadn’t played since Saturday’s 4-0 loss in Vancouver. The Devils were playing their second game in as many nights. Toronto had produced 10 wins and 20 points in their opening 15 games. The gutted Devils, whose recent personnel depletion had seen prized forwardDavid Clarkson flee to the Maple Leafs in free agency and star player Ilya Kovalchuk retire to the Russian league, had managed just four victories and 12 points in the same number of outings.
And yet for much of the night — before Phil Kessel potted the marvelous power-play goal that gave the home team a 1-0 lead midway through the third period and had Carlyle name-checking the wind-up rushes of hall of famer Frank Mahovlich — the Leafs looked like a team struggling to shake off rust. Meanwhile the Devils, who outshot Toronto 35-28, spent long stretches of five-on-five play controlling the puck in the home zone. Solid goaltending from Jonathan Bernier kept the Devils off the board until the Toronto netminder made a rare mistake with about five minutes to go in the third period; on the power-play goal by Michael Ryder that tied the game 1-1, the puck took a strange bounce off Bernier’s paddle and found the top corner.
Credit Cory Schneider with the save of the night that repelled a Leafs 3-on-1 in overtime, Kessel thwarted by a split-padded reach across the crease. James van Riemsdyk scored the shootout winner.
Carlyle, for his part, stuck to accentuating the positives. He said he was pleased that the Leafs had drawn six power plays — this after averaging just 2.5 man advantage situations in the previous half-dozen games. The coach said it was a hint, albeit a small one, that the team’s blase 5-on-5 play was improving.
“(Drawing those penalties indicated) we were doing things right as far as getting the puck into their zone, creating more offensive zone time,” Carlyle said. “But it’s only a stepping stone for our club.”
Said centreman Nazem Kadri: “We’re slowly getting it.”
Not that the Leafs weren’t dealing with their own set of issues. Friday was their first game since centreman Dave Bolland severed a tendon that is expected to keep him out of the lineup for an extended period. They were also without Tyler Bozak, who missed his fifth straight game with a hamstring injury that won’t see him back in blue and white until Nov. 21 at the earliest.
Van Riemsdyk, a career winger charged with playing centre during the shortage, flashed his obvious inexperience in the middle. He lost nine of 13 faceoffs. But his line, flanked by Kessel and Joffrey Lupul, produced some of Toronto’s only credible offence.
Clarkson, playing in his first game against his old team, also nearly did some damage, narrowly missing on a couple of glorious chances in the game’s opening minutes.
Despite widespread speculation that Morgan Rielly would be a healthy scratch — this after a substandard effort in Vancouver — he was in the lineup. With forward Colton Orr out with an unspecified injury, the Leafs ran with seven defencemen, among them Mark Fraser, who returned after missing 13 games with a bum knee.
The evening was, despite a game that was often painfully uneventful, an occasion. It was Hall of Fame night, for one, with inductees Chris Chelios, Scott Niedermayer, Brendan Shanahan and Geraldine Heaney on hand to take a bow in an extended pre-game ceremony that also included an early Remembrance Day tribute to veterans. Stephen J. Harper, the Prime Minister and recently published hockey historian, brought along a hefty RCMP detail. (The PM would have presumably been appalled that Kessel, when asked if he knew of Mahovlich, replied: “Uh, not really.”) And given that it was Johnny Bower’s 89th birthday, in some plush corner of the Air Canada Centre there was also sparklers and cake.
All week Carlyle had been asking his team to commit to the game’s meat and potatoes. Move the puck quickly and quit turning it over, the coach implored his team — and when you do give it up, hit somebody.
“We realize there’s a lot of positives (including special teams and goaltending). But we want to point out the negatives,” Kadri said. “We’re making turnovers in crucial areas. Our forecheck hasn’t been nearly as good as it has to be. Our neutral-zone play — just letting teams attack us. We’re receiving the game when we’re not playing well. And a lot of times that results in being outshot and being out-chanced.”
As Carlyle said this week: “It’s not just wins — we need more compete level, we need more doggedness around the puck. It all has to go up . . . I think we have to get back to a more workmanlike game versus the cute game that we’ve been trying to play.”
Eleven wins in 16 starts — that’s an undeniably good-looking record. But efforts like Friday’s, if they’re repeated against an old nemesis on Saturday night, are unlikely to yield either vengeance or victory.
Story taken from the Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/sports/leafs/2013/11/08/maple_leafs_edge_devils_in_shootout.html
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