Good but not Good Enough, Maple Leafs rank and top the chart on number one worst team 2024
First game home after a long road trip, a scenario typically susceptible to a stumble. Facing the same opponent — reigning Stanley Cup champions, no less — you humiliated just a few days ago. The Vegas Golden Knights were huffing steam out of their nostrils.
Situation ripe for the stars to misalign. For the Maple Leafs to sink below the horizon of a seven-game win streak screeching to a halt. Most of these guys have never even been in that time zone before.
For nearly 30 minutes on Tuesday evening at Scotiabank Arena, Ilya Samsonov — the sublimely resurrected Samsonov, on a personal hurtle of six consecutive wins (didn’t start last Thursday’s dismantling of the Knights off the Strip) — looked like he might single-handedly dictate this encounter. And in a way he did, in the 6-2 defeat.
First game home after a long road trip, a scenario typically susceptible to a stumble. Facing the same opponent — reigning Stanley Cup champions, no less — you humiliated just a few days ago. The Vegas Golden Knights were huffing steam out of their nostrils.
Situation ripe for the stars to misalign. For the Maple Leafs to sink below the horizon of a seven-game win streak screeching to a halt. Most of these guys have never even been in that time zone before.
For nearly 30 minutes on Tuesday evening at Scotiabank Arena, Ilya Samsonov — the sublimely resurrected Samsonov, on a personal hurtle of six consecutive wins (didn’t start last Thursday’s dismantling of the Knights off the Strip) — looked like he might single-handedly dictate this encounter. And in a way he did, in the 6-2 defeat.
Couple of shaky goals surrendered in the middle frame, shades of the Bad Sammy from October through December 2023. One was indisputably lousy, through the pads — though, of considerable significance, the result of a foolish decision by John Tavares to play the puck off the boards rather than safely around the net, intercepted, centred to William Karlsson — which made it 3-1 with 48.8 seconds left in the determinative second; the other more excusable from a goalie’s perspective, a point shot redirected by a deft waist-level-raised stick by Mason Morelli.
Ivan Barbashev had opened the scoring at 9:11 after a scoreless first period, where territorial advantage had swung from Toronto to Vegas.
Tyler Bertuzzi, who’s been on a one-man mash over the last couple of games, had put some lead in Toronto’s pencil at 17:45 — his fourth of the Leafs’ last five goals — with a clever fake-cum-wrister from real low in the circle that beat Adin Hill, albeit inadvertently deflected off the skate of Alec Martinez: five-hole bank shot. At the very least, however, Bertuzzi’s 11th of the season ensured that Toronto would not be shut out: 203 games and counting since that last happened.
The Leafs pushed back hard in the third, flexing first-line muscle especially, but these Knights were not the saps of five nights previous. They sturdily withstood close calls orchestrated by Toronto until Jonathan Marchessault, off a scramble at 10:50, quenched any bid at a late rally. Seemed that way, anyway, although Toronto managed one final peck at the score: a two-on-one orchestrated by Pontus Holmberg that ended with Ryan Reaves shovelling the puck behind Hill. Alex Pietrangelo iced it with a cruise missile empty-netter. Samsonov was back between the pipes when Nicolas Roy bagged No. 6 for Vegas with 31 seconds left. That was after coach Sheldon Keefe had been tossed out on his ear for vociferously disagreeing with a tripping call on Mitch Marner.
It was as stinko a game as the Leafs have put up circa ’24, the team inexplicably so much better on the road this season: 15-11-2 at home now. Not quite meek in submission — Keefe would later claim it had been the team’s best start to a game all season, which is a jaw-dropping exaggeration — but it lacked resolve after Toronto had barrel-housed along this past fortnight. The offence dried up and the defence got snookered, most notably the reunited (until the third period) tandem of Morgan Rielly and T.J. Brodie, minus-four for each on the night.
All good things must end, and this one with a thud. “We lost two points today, yeah?’’ a downcast Samsonov said afterward. “It’s a hard loss for us, especially for me. “I think we, especially right now, we play better, yeah? We a better team, yeah? I don’t know. I’m so … so mad (that) we lost two points like that.’’
Screens, deflections, rebounds — they all got the better of Samsonov on this occasion. Then he took back the “maddened’’ part.“I’m not angry. Just want to get rest. Day is over. I need to be angry on the ice, not in the locker room.’’
At least to start, it felt a bit like St. Morgan-among-the-Hurons. The martyr by way of suspension, Rielly was wrapped inside the warm embrace of a quasi-standing ovation when his name was announced at Scotiabank Arena, where the Leafs hadn’t been since demolishing Anaheim 9-2 on Feb. 17. But Rielly’s wildly atypical bushwhacking of Ridly Greig in the dying moments of a 5-3 loss in Ottawa a week earlier was actually as good a place as any to pinpoint the team-deep transformation, the emboldening of the club, amidst the fortnight surge that’s now in the rear-view mirror.
“Challenging,’’ admitted Rielly, who was paired with Simon Benoit in the third. “We try to work on that stuff in practice, changing partners and whatnot. There’s obviously room for improvement. Moving forward as a D-corps, we just want to be ready and play better than we did tonight.’’
Keep in mind that, less than a month ago, the Leafs were barely clinging to a wild-card spot and appeared headed into a trough, despite the gobsmacking scoring prowess of Auston Matthews.
Then Keefe made the rather awkward decision to demote Tavares to the third line and second power-play unit after he returned from a fleeting injury and illness. That’s gutsy for a bench boss, potentially knocking the wind out of his captain and second-highest paid player. Yet that reconstituted second triumvirate, Max Domi centring Bertuzzi and William Nylander has, since Tavares’s relegation on the 19th, racked up nine goals and seven assists.
There are deeper analytics reflecting the astuteness of Keefe this last month, but stats prats tend to suck the joy out of everything, so we’ll leave it there for now.
