TORONTO — Only a month of hockey separates the Toronto Maple Leafs from another post-season test, another chance for the core leaders of this group to break through and prove they’re capable of replacing potential with performance.
Down to the campaign’s home stretch, the days of hoping it all comes together are long gone, each game now just as crucial as an opportunity to hone their approach, and patch over the necessary holes, as it is a brick in the path to a potential division title. Thursday night, under the Scotiabank Arena lights, the Maple Leafs got a chance to see how they measure up against the league’s elite, with the defending champion Florida Panthers coming to town to battle over the Atlantic crown.
“That’s as close to a playoff game as you’re going to get,” winger Max Domi said from the locker room after the dust settled on the festivities, the winger finishing with a goal and a fight himself. “I think, for the most part, we played a real solid game — that’s a hell of a hockey team over there.”
Solid as it might’ve been, it was the visiting Cats who bagged two points by the night’s end, expanding their lead atop the division standings, fending off the Maple Leafs even with a couple lineup stalwarts still on the sidelines. And it was one particular area — one ghost that’s haunted these Maple Leafs plenty of times before — that wound up the difference on the night.
“It was a good battle,” head coach Craig Berube said post-game. “I thought five-on-five it was a pretty even game. I liked our third period a lot.
“The difference is they scored two power-play goals, and we didn’t capitalize on our PP.”
Three minutes into this one, it looked like it all might fall the Maple Leafs’ way. After the Panthers came out flying, and the clubs traded some early blows, it was the home side that struck first, William Nylander and John Tavares linking up for a goal two minutes into the tilt.
Then came an interference penalty from David Kampf midway through the period, then a roughing call for Oliver Ekman-Larsson five minutes after that — while they escaped the first penalty kill, Toronto got burned on the second, Sam Bennett tapping in a rebound to level the score in the final minutes of the opening frame. A period later, the Maple Leafs found themselves gifted a golden opportunity to flex some offensive muscle of their own. Florida earned two trips to the box in the opening 10 minutes of the middle frame — Toronto came up empty-handed both times, managing little in the way of sustained pressure or grade-A looks.
Late in that second period, the Maple Leafs got yet another lesson in capitalizing on chances that arrive on a silver platter — a too-many-men call sent Florida’s power play over the boards once again, and a defensive breakdown resulted in another power-play tally from Bennett, this one finishing as the eventual game-winner.
“We need to obviously clean up our PK. We need to get those kills,” assessed defender Chris Tanev, who returned to the lineup Thursday after missing two weeks with an upper-body injury. “Late in periods especially — they’re huge momentum killers.
“We started off great, and then they score, and then they build that momentum and bring it into the second after a late goal in the first. And then they score another late one in the second. We need to clean that stuff up.”
There’s no mystery when it comes to righting the ship in those situations, the veteran blue-liner said. It just comes down to effort.
“We’ll have to look at it, take accountability and see what everyone needs to do better in pressure situations. Getting sticks on pucks, getting clears when we had the chance,” Tanev said. “I mean, you’re down a guy — you need to outwork the power play in order to get kills.”
It’s largely a similar story on the other side of the puck, the Maple Leafs’ bench boss saying post-game that he’s looking for more urgency from his power-play practitioners.
“I didn’t think that we moved the puck quick enough,” Berube said. “That team takes time and space away from you on every PK — they’re very aggressive. And I thought we could’ve moved the puck quicker. And there were opportunities that were there that we didn’t see. There were a few plays where we shot the puck, missed the net, it goes down the zone or it gets cleared — we’ve got to make sure that we’re hitting the net on those plays.”
“I thought our execution wasn’t great on the first couple power plays,” added first-unit mainstay Tavares. “We just didn’t seem to make the right reads, or execute with the puck as we needed to. The opportunity we got in the third was a lot better. We hit a post, and we seemed to create some more pressure, get to some more areas. In the end, it just seemed pucks were bouncing on us a little bit.
“They’re well-structured. They get in lanes, and they’ve got some bodies on pucks, sticks on pucks. We weren’t able to generate as much as we’d like … Obviously an area that’s vital as you come down the stretch this time of year, that we have to get better at.”
The Maple Leafs’ third-period effort, in general, finished as a glimmer of hope for those in the locker room, a sign that this group could put it all together against a top-tier opponent. The key issue, though, is that it came too late, and changed little.
“Just hungry, man,” said Domi when asked what spurred the late-game push. “When you’re down like that, you just empty the tank. We had four lines going — everyone was going short and hard, getting out on the forecheck, our D had great gaps, the transition game was good. More of that, and we’ll get better as a group. … We’re going to get some confidence out of this game. We started to play our best hockey in the third, and we were all over them. We’ve just got to find a way to put a full 60 [minutes] together like that, and that’s when we can start beating teams like that.
“That’s the measuring stick over there. We’ve just to keep building confidence, and that’s who we’ve got to beat.”
His netminder saw it much the same.
“I thought we played extremely hard, especially in the third period,” said Anthony Stolarz. “You know, if we want to win games and we want to make a deep run, that last 20 minutes is going to have to be a staple for us going forward.”
In a sense, it was a microcosm of where this Maple Leafs team has been for a fair bit. Able to hang in it, make a late push, look elite for a stretch — and prone to seeing that work undone by coming up short in the big moments, when the big opportunities are there in front of them.
“We all knew going in, it’s tight. The way they play, there’s not a lot of room, and you’ve got to stay patient within your game, not force things. I thought we did a good job of that,” Berube said of his club’s effort Thursday night. “We limited their shots and they limited our shots — I mean, that’s a high-volume shot team. So I thought our checking was good, and I thought we did a lot of good things. You always want to be better. We’ve got to push through this and get better. You know, we competed hard, and it was a hard game. It was a tough, tight hockey game out there.
“We had power-play opportunities, and we didn’t capitalize on them — and they did.”
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