Toronto Maple Leafs – HystericallyBored

2024-01-102024-01-16

The 2023-24 Maple Leafs

There are about 10 or 11 teams in the very competitive NHL that could make a serious run at the Stanley Cup this year:

Winnipeg Jets
Vancouver Canucks
Boston Bruins
Colorado Avalanche
New York Rangers
Florida Panthers
Dallas Stars
Vegas Golden Knights
Toronto Maple Leafs
Carolina Hurricanes
Los Angeles Kings

Several teams are not far behind this cluster and could easily make a run at the playoffs if they get hot. It is a very competitive league and, as has been observed, winning the NHL championship is likely the most difficult challenge of any major team sport. It is long, hard, and grueling.

I have been a Toronto Maple Leaf fan since about 1967– I am so old that I actually saw the Leafs win a Stanley Cup (in 1967). I remember that at that time, they were close behind the Canadiens for the total number of championships: it was 13 to 11. Since then, it has become 24 (!) to 11.

The Leafs have a notoriously bad record in recent years in the playoffs. They actually have a good record of making the playoffs, each of the past seven years, but, with the exception of last year in which they eliminated Tampa Bay, they have not won a single series. It is a stain on the careers of Austin Matthews, John Tavares, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, and Morgan Rielly, none of whom have performed particularly well in the playoffs. It is an even bigger stain on their goaltenders, Jack Campbell and Frederick Andersen, neither of which have been able to “come up big” in decisive playoff games.

This obscures the fact that the Leafs do have a very good team. They can score goals but their defense is suspect. Their No. 1 goalie, Ilya Samsonov, is a wreck and has been demoted and their next most auspicious candidate, Joseph Woll, is injured. Matt Murray– last I heard– was hurt and will not return (I think he was moved to Pittsburgh, last I heard). Martin Jones has stepped in and is currently performing exceptionally well.

No Leaf fan can forget how they led the decisive game 7 against Boston 4-3 in the third period a few years ago only to see Frederick Andersen allow three highly questionable goals, including the egregious one through the five-hole that gave up the lead. The Leafs lost 7-4 (one empty net goal).

The Leafs have lately looked pretty good, with Martin Jones in net. But so has Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, New York Rangers, and Boston.

I am optimistic– I always am, this time of year, recently– about the playoffs. The Leaf “core four” (Nylander, Matthews, Marner, Tavares) are a year older. Tavares in not getting more effective, but the other three are entering the years in which most athletes are in their prime. They also have the bitter experience of losing in the first round in six of the last seven playoffs (and the second round last year) to teams that appeared to be inferior to them. They should know now how much grit, consistency, and determination is required to win a seven-game series. They should be tougher, more resilient. Matthews in particular seems to have stepped up his game.

I am suspicious of Nylander– he can be brilliant but he also gives the puck away far too often and sometimes seems to be coasting outside the blueline waiting for a pass. Both he and Marner make risky passes and it’s hard to assess whether the pretty goals they generate outweigh the ugly goals they give up. One immediately remembers overtime in a game against Boston this year in which Nylander turned back with the puck– a thing he likes to do too often– and fell. He just fell, giving up the puck to the two deadliest forwards on Boston (and the game-winning goal). The other night, he was coasting to the bench while Colorado was in full press mode towards the Leaf net. They scored.

There is also hope in regard to the Leafs 3rd and 4th lines, and other secondary players like Matthew Knies who is improving in every game. Jarnkrok in particular has become more effective, Domi is showing some determination and more skill, and Robertson occasionally threatens.

On defense, Rielly is actually playing better than he did last year when he seemed to be struggling at times and lost his instincts for contributing on offense. Brodie and Giordano or good– not excellent– Liljegren seems to be improving. McCabe can be forceful. Timmins and Lagesson strike me as filler material. They could use another good pick-handling defenseman. The need a good defensive defenseman even more: they often mishandle the puck in their own corners and end up running around chasing while the opposition sets up.

The Leafs made what I consider a major blunder is allowing Justin Holl to walk– I thought he had improved significantly over the past few years and he is playing pretty well for Detroit– and an even bigger blunder is signing forward Ryan Reaves (thank goodness he’s out right now) and an incomprehensible blunder in signing John Klingberg (out for the season, I believe), who has a career -40 rating.

When Woll returns, will he be as effective as he was at the beginning of the season? Will Jones continue his solid performances? We haven’t seen Dennis Hildeby in action yet– he is a great unknown, a large (for goalie– for anybody) player at 6′ 7″ and 200 lbs. The Leafs will almost surely start him at some point in the near future, for there is a perception out there that the Leafs have overworked their #1 goalies the last few years perhaps contributing to their disappointing performances in the playoffs.

So, as usual, I will expect the Leafs to finally advance further than the first round this year. I expect Matthews, Marner, and Nylander– with their increased experience– to contribute more. Matthews in particular seems more able than ever before to summon his formidable talents into a gritty two-way game that can actually redirect the teams momentum at crucial moments. I hope the Leafs do pick up a solid defenseman somewhere for the playoff run. And then we have to hope that Jones and Hildeby or Woll perform well.

Tavares? Tonight, against Detroit, he was worse than ineffective. He gave the puck way, lost almost every battle for the puck along the boards, and seemed slow and lethargic. He was so awful I wonder if he is hurt.

The NHL is a very tough league. The Leafs have shown this year that they can beat any team on a any given night. Perhaps this is the year they finally show that they can win a seven-game series against a tough opponent. If they do, they need the “core four” to perform well but I expect they will win only if they get unexpected contributions from players like Knies, Jarnkrok, and Domi. The impact of sensational players like Matthews is generally not as great as most people think it is. (I thought the Blue Jays were deluded in their vain attempt to sign Ohtani in the off-season: for the same money, they could have improved themselves at four or five other positions and that would have had a bigger impact on their overall success.)

Look at the winning teams for the past decades: they are comprised of a star or two, yes, but more importantly an assembly of strong secondary talents, reliable goal-tenders who don’t allow soft goals at crucial moments of the game, and defensemen who, once they have the puck, can smoothly move it out of the defensive zone to forwards who have positioned themselves to receive it and advance into the other team’s zone. Justin Holl’s major fault, until last year, was the frequency with which he blindly shot the puck along the boards to the opposition point man, or passed the puck to players who were either being checked or didn’t exist. Jake Gardiner, before him, was even worse at that. This is the play before the play that results in cheap goals against. Teams don’t win championships with great saves by their goalie (though Montreal, with Carey Price, came close a few years ago). They win by preventing those chances in the first place.

The Leafs appear to me to have improved in this area. Until recently. They have recently looked weak and disorganized. Both the power play and the penalty kill have been atrocious.

Given the level of talent on the club, you have to look elsewhere. I believe it’s time to fire coach Sheldon Keefe.

2022-04-25

The 2021-2022 Maple Leafs

It seems incredible that a Canadian NHL team has not won the Stanley Cup since Montreal did it in 1993.

Yes, 1993. 29 years ago.

I said last year that the 2020-21 Montreal Canadiens were probably the least talented team to ever make the Stanley Cup Finals. I seem to have been vindicated in my opinion by their performance this year: they are nowhere near the level they seemed to reach in the 2021 playoffs. Really good teams rarely fail to perform well in the years just before and after a championship appearance. Even after the loss of a star player, most great teams will have a core of solid talents that carry them through the early rounds. My theory was that their progress then was largely due to Carey Price and sheer determination and hustle and a bit of luck (the Leafs were very close to eliminating them in the first round). This year, the Canadiens lost Price to personal issues and collapsed as a team. It will be a while before they return to a competitive level, though perhaps not as long as we used to think. NHL teams lately have shown a remarkable ability to rebuild quickly.

The Leafs have what is probably the best team they have ever put on the ice, with the exception of goal-tending. Austin Matthews may well be the best over-all player in the NHL this year; Mitch Marner is not far behind– if he is behind. Marner’s incredible vision on the ice is remarkable. In a game tonight against the Islanders, he made a back-handed pass right onto the tape of Nylander’s stick that seemed jarringly unlikely given his position, headed into the corner. He has an uncanny awareness of where the spaces are, where his team-mates are, and who is a position to shoot. He does this a lot. How many goals would Matthews have if he were playing with someone else? But then, how many assists would Marner have? Last night, in the absence of Matthews, Marner set up Nylander several other times but Nylander missed all except one, and that one squiggled through the goalie.

One commentator tonight (April 23) mentioned, in an off-hand manner, that Marner might be “underrated”. I think he’s right. They showed a list of the top five candidates for the Hart trophy: the leading scorer of the past 3 months was not on the list. Yes, that’s Mitch Marner.

Michael Bunting is supposed to be the gritty line-mate to compliment Marner and Matthew’s finesse but it would be useful if he receive passes with a bit more dexterity and cash in on some of the golden opportunities his line-mates give him. Why do other teams hate him? Sure, he draws a lot of penalties, but he’s not really a “dirty” player. But other teams tend to go after him for some unknown reason.

In addition to Marner and Matthews, the Leafs have several pretty good secondary offensive threats, particularly in Nylander, a mysterious player who often seems to be punching the clock, until you notice that he has 6 goals in the last 8 games. Where did they come from? He often misses the net, because he always tries for the corners, usually the upper corners, but his shots are crisp and quick, he’s a great puck handler, and he is very fast. He may score 50 some day. John Tavares should be providing more of a threat from the 2nd line than he currently does. He’s just not as sharp as Marner or Matthews but I give him credit for grit and determination for a good player past his prime.

Ilya Mikheyev is also impressive. The Leafs have had speedy forwards before but often without a deft touch at the net (Russ Courtnall, Kasperi Kapanen): Mikheyev shows signs of figuring out how to actually get it past the goaltender once he has broken free of the defense, which he does a lot. Alex Kerfoot is a threat– like Tavares, gritty and persistent, and he’s also pretty fast. Pierre Engvall has good nights and may end up being a key part of the team if it advances. He is big but also quick and a threat on the penalty kill.

Jason Spezza should really sit down. He’s just not that quick anymore. When is the last time he got a goal? Filler. He seems like a likeable guy but, sheesh, the Leafs are gunning for playoff success here and I really believe a younger talented player like Blackwell would be more helpful than Spezza at this point.

On defense, I believe Reilly may be over-rated. Yes, he’s a good skater and gets a lot of assists, but he also occasionally rushes to the net and shoots right at the goalie’s midsection, or he rushes down the ice, blowing past players to the left and the right, then he dumps the puck in. Tonight, he broke in alone on goal and couldn’t manage to do anything except fall down in front of the goalie as the puck slid away. Still, it’s very hard to measure the defensive impact of a player who, through good skating and puck handling, minimizes the time the other team spends in possession of the puck. It’s one thing for a defenseman to block a shot; it’s even better if the other team never got the shot in the first place.

Mark Giordano is not bad. He seems reliable. Ilya Lyubushkin is a question mark: he often just fumbles around with the puck, unsure of where to go or what to do. Jake Muzzin is okay and a balance to the more offensive-minded partners on defense. Brodie makes a lot of mistakes lately. Justin Holl made a lot of mistakes earlier in the season but has improved though he still makes bad decisions in his own zone– turning around and going back and getting trapped in the corner, or passing to someone who is about to be checked. Actually, he does that a lot. Timothy Liljegren has been playing well lately, going to the net when the opportunity presents itself. Rasmus Sandin makes mistakes but also looks promising.

The Leaf’s biggest 5 on 5 weakness is their inability to break up the play when trapped in their own zone: the puck seems to ricochet around the boards from one attacking defenseman to another until they can force a scramble in front of the net or a one-timer from the side. Buffalo, for some reason, seemed adept at breaking up that kind of zone trap against the Leafs, but the Leafs seem flummoxed by that kind of action in their own end. They chase and scramble along the boards and then give up the puck.

The real problem– and Leafs’ management knows it — is that, aside from a spell earlier in the season, Jack Campbell has not been reliable in goal, and Petr Mrazek has been awful. Erik Kallgren showed some promise but has also had disastrous nights. At one point, it appears that Kyle Dubas was involved in secret negotiations for Fleury from Chicago but they fell through, and it’s Campbell, probably, for the playoffs, and I shudder to think the Leafs might be involved in some close games.

In the last few years, Frederick Anderson fooled fans by making a brilliant save or two and then losing sight of a shot from the point, or losing track of the puck in a scramble in front of the net and giving up a cheap goal. Fans tend to judge goalies generously if they make a spectacular save or two, but the really great playoff goalies are consistent. Nothing is more depressing than to see a team make a gritty, determined effort to tie the game only to see a fluke shot go in at the other end, something that happened regularly with Frederick Anderson, memorably against Boston two years ago. And nothing gives a team more confidence to make daring attacks than a spectacular save by their goalie after one of those daring attacks goes wrong, as Price did last year for Montreal.

Any of about a half-dozen teams or more could win the Stanley Cup this year:

Toronto Maple Leafs
Colorado Avalanche
Florida Panthers
Tampa Bay Lightening
St. Louis Blues
New York Rangers
Minnesota Wild
Carolina Hurricanes

Another half-dozen, including Boston and Pittsburgh, have an outside chance of pulling a few upsets in the first or second rounds of the playoffs.

There is no magic formula to determining who is most likely to win. There are always surprises and disappointments. On paper, the Panthers and Avalanche would be favorites, but both are beatable– any team is– on a good night for the other team (the Panthers, at home tonight, just barely escaped with an overtime victory against the Leafs who had the better chances in the 3rd period). Over a best of seven series, good luck, great goal-tending, and that intangible, random, thing we sometimes call “focus” or “inspiration” or “grit” can play a huge role in determining the outcome. We’ve all seen teams with amazing scoring prowess suddenly totally smothered by disciplined defensive team with great goal-tending. It happened to Toronto, Vegas, Pittsburgh, and Colorado in 2021. It could happen to any of the great offensive teams this year, Florida, Toronto, and Colorado.

The Leafs have gone 17 seasons without winning a single playoff series, and are 0-8 in potential series winning games over that stretch. That may sound really, really awful, but keep in mind that it’s a big league and those numbers are not all that unusual. There are teams that have done even worse.

What the Leafs have going for them is, firstly, that they have the best winning percentage in the NHL against playoff opponents (and the worst against teams that are not going to make the playoffs), and, secondly, Matthews and Marner both have a year of additional experience and a painful awareness of how awful they were last year in seven games against Montreal (Matthews: 1 goal, 4 assists; Marner: 0 goals, 4 assists). Matthews in particular seems determined to add more grit and aggression to his performance and seems, at times, more capable of willing himself into a more dominant role against even formidable opposition.

We’ll see.

Tonight (April 24, 2022) the Leafs beat Washington in a shoot-out despite being badly outplayed through most of the game. The Leafs’ performance was not reassuring in reference to their playoff prospects. My impression is that teams that are capable of tight defense tend to prevail over teams that emphasize offense. The Leaf defense tonight was often terrible, leaving players uncovered, allowing breakaways, giving the puck away, and endless chasing in their own zone. Quite often, Washington simply pushed Leaf players aside and took the puck.

And yet, the Leafs scored two goals in the later stages of the 3rd period, by Mikeyev and Spezza(!), including one with the net empty, to overcome a 3-1 Washington lead and take it to overtime– where they took a penalty. In the shootout, almost everybody missed until Kerfoot managed to tuck one in to win the game.

Erik Kallgren, it must be said, did marvelously well in the shoot-out, stopping every attempt except the very first one.

I don’t get why it isn’t obvious to the Leafs that they need a different strategy for breaking up plays along the boards in their own zone.

I also can’t comprehend why anyone in the Leafs’ brain trust actually believes the back-pass on the powerplay is even remotely useful. I’ve been watching them do this forever and it mostly fails. Why does anyone think it is working?

1999-05-032022-04-11

Freddy Shero’s Legacy

The last time the Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Philadelphia Flyers in the playoffs, Roger Neilson was behind the Leafs’ bench and Fred Shero was behind the Flyers’ bench, and the series consisted mostly of a sequence of mad brawls followed by flurries of penalties and goals. The Flyers were known as the “Broad Street Bullies” for their style of hacking, hitting, and chopping their way to victory.

The Flyers won that series. This year, the Leafs won. The Leafs won a playoff series without ever scoring more than 2 goals in a single game. Ironically, this is the long-term result of the style of play popularized by those Shero Flyers years ago.

What Shero realized before anyone else did, was that the officiating in the NHL had reached a kind of regulatory quandary by the early 1970’s. The NHL was busy trying to sell hockey to expansion U.S. markets and it was widely believed that U.S. audiences were more attracted by fisticuffs and brawling than the slick play-making of teams like the Canadiens and Maple Leafs or Red Wings. So fighting was “good” for hockey. But even hockey has rules. If players like Ken Linseman of the Flyers got penalties for all the rule infractions he committed, the Flyers would lose every game.

Fights or no fights, sports fans hate losers, so the NHL had to find some way to allow the violence to continue, while giving dirty teams a chance to win.

Now, nobody that I know of ever actually came right out and said, “hey, let’s just call the same number of penalties on both teams no matter who actually breaks the rules”. They didn’t have to. You heard it from coaches and managers and sports analysts and Don Cherry. They used euphemistic phrases like, “let the boys play”, “the referee shouldn’t become part of the game”, “they play an aggressive style” (not a dirty style– “aggressive”). I’m sure that within the private offices of the NHL, more explicit instructions were issued.

The strategy was very simple. There are a thousand interactions in any particular game of hockey that could, with a stretch of the imagination, be called a penalty. So the referees would occasionally call a penalty when a thug like Dave “Hammer” Schultz tried to take somebody’s head off, but the next penalty would inevitably be called on the other team. Schultz could hook, hack, chop, grab, elbow, and punch a dozen players and get one penalty. A few minutes later, Borje Salming would lean on a player in front of the net and get called for interference. Even-steven. If a referee ever dared to call three penalties in a row on the same team, coaches, players, and managers screamed bloody murder– the referee had broken one of the unspoken rules of the game: he had actually penalized the team that committed the most infractions!

The end result was that teams like Philadelphia, and, later, New Jersey, could commit hundreds of fouls and still win, because no matter how many fouls Philadelphia committed, the other team would get just about as many penalties. Philadelphia rode this strategy to a Stanley Cup. New Jersey learned to simply mug players in the neutral zone less conspicuously than the Flyers, but it worked just as well and they won several Stanley Cups.

Well, even the NHL has some shame. After a few years of pronounced media coverage of the “Broad Street Bullies”, the NHL decided to make a relatively modest attempt to eliminate fighting. They started handing out serious penalties for actual fisticuffs, especially in the playoffs when fighting seems more… “unseemly”. But it did not eliminate the officiating style that permitted teams to get away with thousands of little infractions. Teams like New Jersey refined the schtick, with holding, interference, and obstruction, refined to a high art. Because it didn’t look as dirty as a Ken Linseman cross-check or a Bobby Clarke slash, the officials tended to let it go. New Jersey was able to win a Stanley Cup with its “neutral zone trap”. The drawbacks, however, were obvious: scoring decreased and many hockey games became nothing more than a long boring sequence of impeded skaters and incomplete passes.

The lack of scoring alarmed the NHL. Next to fighting, fans want to see scoring. They tried various strategies, adding space behind the net, trying to call more “obstruction” penalties, and so on. But ingrained habits are hard to change. The referees keep drifting back to their old style of indifference and equity, just like the umpires in baseball keep calling the same ridiculously low strike zone.

If you look at the over-time stats for the past year in the NHL, the numbers are truly embarrassing. Only a small percentage of the games ended with a victor. And everybody knows that a tie “is like kissing your sister”.

And thus we have the 1999 Toronto-Philadelphia series. During the regular season, Toronto scored more goals than any other team in the NHL. Philadelphia was in the middle of the pack, but it was clear that their strategy depended upon the ability of their huge defensemen to impede, obstruct, and interfere with their faster opponents.

It is a bit of the miracle that the Leafs won, and the way they did it is telling: they simply did to the Flyers what the Flyers intended to do to them. The Leafs only scored about six goals altogether. Well, all right: they scored about 10. They held the lead, all told, for about ten minutes over six games. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, those few minutes were always at the end of the game.

The winning difference was Curtis Joseph, who seems to be able to make the big stop when it is most needed, and the Leaf forwards, almost all of whom can shoot, who were able to get a goal when it really counted: in the last minute, or in overtime.

The biggest irony was the series deciding goal– on a power play with three minutes left. Toronto had been called for five penalties in a row in the second and third periods, and Philadelphia had been unable to cash in. If anyone had a right to complain, it was Toronto: the referees (two of them now) broke the unspoken agreement– they called real infractions, even if all of them went against the same team. When they finally did call a Flyers’ penalty, it looked like something they might have let go in the Dave Schultz era.

The Flyers complained bitterly about it afterwards. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. They lost the series because of their pathetic inability to score during five consecutive man advantages, including 3 in a span of 7 minutes, not because of the one Leaf goal at the end.