1. Where do the Toronto Maple Leafs and Timothy Liljegren go from here?
Even with a third-pairing, right-shot defenceman more suited to the GM and coach’s vision injured (off-season recruit Jani Hakanpää), Liljegren couldn’t squeeze into the lineup on the club’s first road trip.
The 2017 first-rounder has been leapfrogged not only by Conor Timmins (a decent puck-mover who can ill afford to keep averaging one bad penalty per game) but perhaps the bigger and cheaper Philippe Myers as well.
Yes, Brad Treliving is working the phones trying to move Liljegren and his $3-million cap hit, but if it were that easy to trade a third-pair D-man with a second-pair salary, it would’ve happened already.
There isn’t urgency yet, but there could be soon.
Toronto is maxed out in NHL contracts and cap space, and eventually LTIR players like Hakanpää, Connor Dewar, and Calle Järnkrok will be healthy.
None of those players can be activated for nine more games, so Treliving has time.
Should another Leaf get injured in the meantime, the pressure to move Liljegren gets delayed. Maybe one of the league’s other 31 teams falls victim to injuries and gets desperate for a righty (the L.A. Kings already lost a good one.) And, heck, there is still very much a chance the team needs him. He’s a useful NHL-level talent, and at age 25, his best games should still rest ahead.
Ultimately, however, we don’t see a long-term future here between an inconsistent — and, likely, frustrated, player — and a regime that didn’t draft him.
Berube — who won his Cup with a bunch of big, nasty D-men — has made it clear that he prefers his blueliners huge. (“They get in the way,” he chuckles.) Ditto for Treliving.
So, the Leafs are willing to play this out for at least a couple weeks, but at some point something must change.
Either Liljegren gets into the lineup and fights for more work, or he falls victim to a cap crunch and gets a fresh start in a different sweater.
2. Myers squared up with Montreal’s Josh Anderson in pre-season action. Not only did he lose the fight. He looked lost. He had no technique. No plan:
To his credit, the six-foot-five, 219-pound Myers approached teammate/heavyweight Ryan Reaves at one of the Maple Leafs’ next practices and asked for a lesson.
That’s not the first time a teammate enrolled in Reaves’ School of Scrap 101.
“I had a small Russian kid in New York — he asked me how to fight. He’s not a fighter,” Reaves recalls. “It’s different talking to somebody like that than somebody like Myers, who’s longer, stronger, and probably getting a couple tilts with some bigger guys. You can give him pointers on how to use his strength, use his long arms.
“Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got to use their strengths to their advantage. You have to understand your weaknesses, and then you gotta understand who you’re fighting and what their strengths could be and what their weaknesses could be.”
It was a just an introductory course: Get a good jersey grab. Never turn your head away from your opponent. Punch from your shoulder.
The key is to be the most comfortable man squaring up.
Reaves says he did some work with veteran teammates B.J. Crombeen and Cam Janssen when he was entering the league. But most of his technique was sharpened through summertime boxing lessons from a former hockey player turned Olympic boxing coach.
Reaves and his coach would wear hockey sweaters in the ring to mimic the real deal.
“We practised grabbing quickly, using my punching hand to steer the fight, punching quick off a grab,” Reaves explains. “The biggest thing I noticed coming out of there was… before I threw a lot more with my body and tried to use my momentum — which is not how you throw a punch. It comes a lot from your shoulders. So, I feel like when I came back from that summer, just the technique of my punch was much harder and much more sound.”
Reaves recalls using his sharpened technique in 2011 against Chicago tough guy Daniel Carcillo, who was responding to a hit Reaves threw on Patrick Kane:
After Reaves took down the veteran with surprising swiftness, Carcillo shouted from one penalty box to the other: “What the f— was that? I didn’t know what to do.”
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I just happened to do it by accident. I looked back at the fight like, OK, I could use that. And kind of perfected that technique. I use that a lot,” Reaves says.
“You want to be the most comfortable in the fight.”
Early on, Reaves spent two summers training as a boxer, then began trading off-ice workout tips with another coach in exchange for a sparring partner.
Nowadays, he’s less intense with it. He has a strategy. He mostly just hits the punching bag by himself to keep his punching technique sharp and his power up.
3. OK, playoff predictions (sorry, Metro).
Atlantic Division: Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers, Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa Bay Lightning, Detroit Red Wings
Metropolitan Division: New York Rangers, New Jersey Devils, Carolina Hurricanes
Pacific Division: Edmonton Oilers, Vancouver Canucks, Vegas Golden Knights, Los Angeles Kings
Central Division: Nashville Predators, Dallas Stars, Winnipeg Jets, Colorado Avalanche
Final Four: Oilers, Predators, Bruins, Devils
Stanley Cup champion: Oilers
4. Quote of the Week.
“Breathe through your nose, not through your a–hole.” — Paul Maurice’s championship advice to the Florida Panthers during the first intermission of Game 2 in the Cup Final.
5. Kyle Connor entered his submission for Sports Records That Will Never Be Broken on Wednesday when he scored in his seventh consecutive season opener, a Winnipeg Jets rout of the Oilers. Take that, Mud Bruneteau.
Connor is still one of the NHL’s most under-discussed talents. You wonder if a big showing at the 4 Nations Face-Off or the next Olympics will turn the American into a household name.
(P.S. Anyone else think Connor could pass for a third Sedin brother now that he’s chopped the flow?)
6. The Maple Leafs signed Bobby McMann to a hard-earned two-year, $2.7-million extension toward the end of last season, so it was surprising to see him left off the lineup card on Opening Night. Especially with a couple fellow wingers, Calle Järnkrok and Connor Dewar, injured.
Coach Craig Berube challenged McMann’s performance in training camp publicly, saying both he and the player know there’s more to give.
Well, the power forward popped into the lineup Thursday and promptly scored.
“He’s a great player,” says linemate Steven Lorentz. “And when you have the depth that we do, some guys are going to come out, maybe not when they deserve to, and it’s an unfortunate part of the business.
“That just gives a coach peace of mind that it doesn’t matter who he’s got on that fourth line, that we’re going to show up and just play our game. We’re not going to do things out of our comfort zone.”
McMann, understandably, doesn’t want to cause waves. He maintains that he wants to play every night but understands the deal.
Hey, the big buzzword around Berube’s arrival was accountability. For Treliving’s off-season roster moves, it was depth.
It’s hardly the worst thing if the Leafs feel they must fight for their minutes.
7. The Leafs’ power-play struggles have trickled over from spring (1-for-21 in the Bruins series) to fall.
Toronto is 0-for-6 to start the Marc Savard era, which wouldn’t be so bad if the eye test wasn’t worse than the numbers.
We’re watching a superstar-loaded $54.15-million top unit that couldn’t be more familiar with one another stumble and fumble. They’ve looked slow, out of sync, and can’t seem to zip passes through lanes.
“Our entries aren’t very good, for one. Both teams we played (Montreal and New Jersey), the (blue) line is pretty stacked, right? And we’re not putting pucks in and just going to work and getting them back,” Berube said.
“The other area is, we’re not attacking and shooting enough. Like, we’re kind of passing it around, looking to pass it in the net, rather than just attacking and shooting, getting pucks and recoveries.”
The Maple Leafs will make the PP a focus in video sessions this weekend.
Berube has already been more even with power-play time between his first and second units than Sheldon Keefe ever was.
If the struggles continue, there are two ways to go: give the big boys 1:40 or blend the personnel and create two balanced groups for true internal competition.
I vote the latter. (Note: I don’t actually receive or deserve a vote.)
8. The latest monster re-signing by the Panthers first caught Paul Maurice’s eye when the former Jets coach was glued to the first round of the 2021 playoffs.
“I’m watching Tampa, but this guy from Florida is all over the puck. He’s on it,” Maurice recalled to reporters. “There’s skill and there’s numbers, but he is just a dog on a bone.
“Some people thrive in certain frequencies. The playoff game is his frequency. I would have watched Tampa — and by proxy, Florida — play those games in the playoffs, and they were close. I didn’t know who Carter Verhaeghe was. Kept seeing that number pop up. Who is this guy?“
Verhaeghe’s teammates will tell you how his attitude is built for overtime, for the post-season, for the highest of stakes.
Which helps explain why he’s helped bring Stanley Cups to both of the Sunshine State’s franchises, why he’s flashed a knack for game-winners, and why his points per game leaps from 0.75 in the regular season to 0.78 come post-season.
“He is a playoff guy because of the speed of the game… is hectic out there, and there is an intensity to it. He thrives in that. That is where he is at his best,” Maurice explained.
“If you could put 20 guys on the ice instead of 10 skaters, he’d score 60. The more chaos, the more traffic, the more he does things that people can’t do. Three-on-three, can he play it? Sure. But I think his strength and his grace and what makes him highly unique is that he is really, really good in chaos.”
So good, Verhaeghe secured a whopping eight-year, $56-million contract extension this week.
9. Is there a greater argument for the Toronto marketing bump than seeing Islanders forward Pierre Engvall (seven years, $21 million) and Red Wings defenceman Justin Holl (four years, $10.2 million) get waived after skating just one season for their new clubs under their new raises?
We never begrudge a player for getting the bag.
But with murmurs of the league’s falsely depressed salary cap being in line for a massive spike soon — possibly as early as this summer — we wonder if a sudden influx of cash flow will simply result in a bunch of overpays for middle-of-the-road free agents.
10. Speaking of late bloomers hitting big pay days, Joey Daccord’s five-year, $25-million extension caught us by surprise.
Not that Daccord wasn’t fantastic last season, when he crushed career highs in appearances (50) and save percentage (.916) and took over as the No. 1 in Seattle.
But we’re talking about a seventh-rounder who has played 69 NHL games total(!) and was plying his trade in the ECHL.
We love Daccord’s attitude and his story. He’s a battler and a beauty.
That said, GMs are increasingly going out of their way to hedge bets on their goaltending, whether that’s Toronto extending Joseph Woll before he proves capable of staying healthy for a full season or the Senators committing $33 million to Linus Ullmark before he’d played a game in Ottawa.
This is happening despite recent goalie bets not paying off as hoped (Cal Petersen, Jack Campbell, Joonas Korpisalo, et al).
Because Ron Francis already went deep on Philipp Grubauer ($5.9 million AAV), the Kraken are scheduled to have a $10.9-million tandem on the books in 2025-26 and 2026-27.
It better pay off.
11. Fun with small sample sizes.
• Utah HC’s Dylan Guenther is on pace for 164 goals.
• Montreal’s Sam Montembeault is tracking 41 shutouts, which can’t hold a candle to the 82 blank sheets Shesterkin is on pace for.
• Buffalo’s Alex Tuch is going to hit the post 82 times.
• Boston’s Mark Kastelic will throw 369 hits.
12. File under “Random and Enthusiastic Bar Encounters.”
On the eve of the Leafs-Canadiens opener at Bell Centre, a friendly man and diehard fan of the visitors approached a table of hockey writers in a Montreal tavern and proudly claimed that he was the infamous Waffle Thrower from 2010.
I have no reason not to take the guy at his word. That would be odd claim to make 14 seasons after the incident, especially unprompted to a bunch of strangers.
He said that not a whole lot of thought went into his projectile protest. Back then, he thought his beloved Leafs were awful.
Awful rhymes with waffle. And waffles are shaped like hockey pucks.
“That’s it,” the man said.
Robb was, at least temporarily, banned from Maple Leafs home games for his actions. So maybe we can take some comfort knowing his passion is still intact all these years later.
And he’s out there, cheering at road games.
Either that, or Robb inspired a very specific imposter.
