TORONTO — On a night billed as Auston Matthews versus Connor Bedard — this rare clash of No. 1 picks and Original Six phenoms, the magical talents billion-dollar organizations tank to obtain — naturally, Arvid Söderblom and Alex Vlasic stole the show.
Such is hockey, this unpredictable team sport where anyone can have himself a night, or an off one.
So it was that the mighty Toronto Maple Leafs lost a sleepy 4-1 home game to last season’s 30th-place Chicago Blackhawks, who started an undrafted 24-year-old goaltender with a career 2-13-2 record.
Neither Matthews nor Bedard found a way onto the scoresheet, after kicking off their seasons with a two-game hat-trick streak and a three-game point streak, respectively.
Absolutely, the Blackhawks deserve full marks for their effort, their penalty-killing and their goaltending Monday, evening their spotlight road trip to a respectable 2-2 before jetting to Denver.
“There’s a lot of heart, there’s a lot of belief in that room,” veteran Corey Perry said, after sniping the breakaway game-winner. “We’re starting to get better.”
The flip side of that coin is the Maple Leafs’ slipshod play without the puck catching up with them, and a dusty theme — playing down to their opponent — rearing its ugly head.
“We weren’t able to take charge of the game, and then you let your opponent hang around,” Keefe said during a not-so-chatty post-game conference.
“We’ve seen this movie before.”
Oh, yeah. As often as ’90s college kids have seen Happy Gilmore. Or our favourite rappers have seen Scarface. Or your daughter has seen Frozen.
Too often, the Maple Leafs assume the identity of their opponent.
The spunky, scrappy Canadiens wanted a high-energy, run-and-gun affair Wednesday, and Toronto happily obliged.
The finish-every-check Minnesota Wild chose a harder brand of hockey and wanted to take turns cycling. The Leafs matched them.
Well, the inexperienced Blackhawks came with little punch, opting to pack the house and patiently wait to jump through the windows of opportunity handed to them by the better team on paper.
And instead of imposing their superiority on a weaker foe, the Leafs got lulled out of their own building.
“I thought we were really sloppy with the puck in the first period, and then we got beat in transition in the second period. That’s really it,” Keefe said.
“The turnover stuff early on, just careless with the puck. And it’s all our best players — really, really careless to start the game. So that didn’t give us a chance to take hold of the game.”
Playing catchup most of the night, Mitch Marner skated an eye-popping 25:53. Matthews logged 25:48 and William Nylander 21:48. Each finished minus-2, though Nylander sliced through middle ice and set up John Tavares for a dynamic strike.
No Blackhawks forward cracked the 20-minute mark, as Luke Richardson rolled his bench and held on tight, withstanding Toronto’s nearly four-minute desperation push at 6-on-5.
Even with Söderblom standing tall and Vlasic’s gorgeous Hail Mary pass to Perry reminiscent of Erik Karlsson’s famous long-bomb saucer to Mike Hoffman in the 2017 playoffs, the Leafs should stomp a rebuilding roster thin on elite players in their prime.
Prior to the loss, Keefe pointed to “a lot of breakdowns in our defensive-zone coverage” that needed tidying up, but when you hang six goals on your enemy, a deadly offence can mask a so-so defence.
The Leafs have now surrendered at least four goals in all three games, and this is what happens when they don’t give their goalies that gaudy run support.
“We didn’t get in alone on their goalie, I don’t think, at all for the whole night. They got three goals on us in alone on our goaltender,” Keefe said.
“Not enough goals to make up for the mistakes.”
He’s spot on.
Fox’s Fast Five
• One of the great areas of adjustment for young forwards entering the league is faceoffs.
Bedard is learning that the hard way. Through four games, he’s won 13 of his 47 draws (27.6 per cent) and got tossed from the dot once on Monday. He’ll figure it out.
• Tyler Bertuzzi has taken five minor penalties already this season, tops in the league. Most of them are stick infractions in the neutral zone or offensive zone, like the trip and high stick he committed on this night. He needs to rein that in.
• Fraser Minten, thinking back to a 13-year-old Connor Bedard sharing the ice with Mathew Barzal and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins: “He was shooting the puck just as good if not better than those guys. And that was probably when I realized it was pretty world-class, that release.”
• Keefe says that with all the off-season departures of penalty killers, he now wants eight forwards to chip in on 4-on-5 situations.
In the coach’s perfect world, each forward kills for 30 seconds or less, then changes.
• Your daily goal song report: Tonight, the Maple Leafs threw it back to 1984 with Van Halen’s “Panama.” The crowd-testing continues…
