TORONTO — Rewind a few weeks, and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ greatest conundrum seemed their greatest strength.
A round ago, when the blue-and-white were flying high through the early going against the wild-card Ottawa Senators, no aspect of Toronto’s game seemed to be soaring higher than the club’s lethal power play. The five-forward unit of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Matthew Knies had not only hung three goals on the Sens in Game 1, it took them a total of 20 seconds to amass the sum.
By the end of the six-game series, the unit had potted six goals on 17 opportunities, finishing Round 1 as the third-most prolific man-advantage squad — and obliterating the paltry 1-for-21 performance the Leafs had put up in their previous post-season go-round.
Now, the Sens have been swapped for the defending champion Florida Panthers, Ottawa’s tentative penalty kill has been replaced by the Cats’ unrelenting aggression, and the Maple Leafs’ power-play dominance has all but disappeared.
The issue was no more pressing than in Sunday’s Game 4. Trailing 1-0 on the road — hunting a win that would’ve pushed the Cats to the brink of elimination — the Maple Leafs were granted three second-period chances to send their all-forward unit over the boards to tie things up.
Not only did the man-advantage end up bringing the Leafs little in terms of quality chances, it wound up doing the opposite, swinging momentum Florida’s way courtesy of a slew of short-handed chances that required Joseph Woll’s best.
Before the clubs headed back out for the third period, veteran winger Blake Wheeler — who amassed 255 points on the man-advantage during his 16-year big-league career — shared his thoughts on the Maple Leafs’ approach during an appearance on Sportsnet’s intermission panel.
“I think I’m ready to see that Toronto power play get mixed up a little bit,” Wheeler said. “The five forwards have obviously had some impact here in the playoffs, but they’re giving up too much against this [Florida] penalty kill. You’re starting to see that they’re taking away from some of the really good things that Mitch Marner does when he’s on the point. You’re really not seeing Auston Matthews get his shot like we’re used to seeing as well.
“I’d really like to see Morgan Rielly back up top. Let’s get Auston Matthews some of these one-timers we’re used to seeing. Mitch Marner’s job is really to set the table on the power play, not to be back-checking against these Florida forwards all night.”
There’s no question the unit has struggled against the Panthers, who nullify power plays by swarming the opposition, attacking the puck-carrier and forcing costly errors.
“You know, they are very good at countering and making you pay for your mistakes,” Marner said Tuesday from the locker room at the Maple Leafs’ practice facility. “We’ve just got to stick with our game plan, stick with our patience. We’ve had our looks — we had our looks last game as well, it just didn’t fall for us. But we’re doing the right things. You’ve got to keep working, and you’ve got to find yourself in good areas.”
The top-unit quarterback shed light on the approach the group’s tried to take through the first four games of this series, to limited success:
“Try to work the puck around as much as we can, try to get them tired,” Marner explained. “And then from that point on, just try to exploit areas that we can. You know, we’ve done a good job throughout the series of doing that. Last game, it just wasn’t there.”
Toronto has struck twice on the man-advantage against Florida, tallying once in Game 2 and once in Game 3. Both goals came in a similar fashion — finding a moment of space at the top of the zone, throwing the puck on net, and getting a quality deflection. In Game 2, it was a puck fired by Rielly that found its way past Sergei Bobrovsky courtesy of an elite Max Pacioretty redirect. In Game 3, it was Tavares deflecting a puck sent on net by Marner, which then careened off penalty-killer Gustav Forsling and into the cage.
Go back through the eight power-play goals scored by Toronto to this point, and you’ll see a similar trend. Three of the eight have bounced off defenders like that Forsling play, the result of simply throwing a puck into traffic and hoping for chaos — as was the case on Tavares’ power-play tally in Game 2 against Ottawa, and Knies’ goal a game later. But more importantly, Toronto’s man-advantage success has largely come from getting the puck on net quickly, rather than moving it around the offensive zone seeking out the perfect sequence.
In Game 1 against the Senators, when the Maple Leafs struck three times on the man-advantage, all three tallies came off shots fired at the net moments after an offensive-zone draw, two of them the result of rebounds tucked home after that initial attempt. The latter three power-play goals in Round 1 came off those fortunate blue-liner bounces, and from Matthews’ Game 6 tally, which saw him find the twine after simply sliding in a curling shot towards the net-front crowd, only to see it drift all the way in.
Against Florida, two quick shots into traffic netted the two successful attempts. But Toronto’s three power-play chances on Sunday saw the Maple Leafs get away from that quick-trigger approach.
The first attempt, five minutes into the middle frame, saw the Leafs struggle to gain the zone, or set up once they were there, Florida continually swarming them along the boards, winning those battles, and getting the puck out. The top unit — which stayed out for the entire two-minute stretch — did try to direct a few pucks to the net-front when they were able to hold onto it in the offensive zone, but couldn’t filter their shots past the penalty killers in front of them. The group looked more hesitant and indecisive as it navigated the pressure.
The second attempt, midway through the second period, was even less promising, the Panthers winning the puck off the first draw in their end and pushing up ice, where Sam Reinhart blew by Matthews, backed up Marner, and got a quality short-handed look on Woll. A few more attempts to gain the Cats’ zone were stymied before the puck was sent all the way back into Toronto’s end again, the Panthers penalty-killers beating Marner to the puck deep in the Maple Leafs’ zone, and the home side earning another dangerous short-handed chance — and a tripping penalty from No. 16 that cut the power play short.
The final attempt, late in the second period, went south early too, a Marner one-timer from the point blocked by Reinhart, turning into a footrace between the two going the other way — Reinhart earned one more short-handed chance, and Marner was forced to wheel around the net to block a follow-up attempt on the rebound.
Simply failing to break through, or falling short in terms of generating quality looks is one thing, but as Wheeler suggested, it’s another to be fighting to keep the puck from going the other way, to be finishing a two-minute power-play spell with the opposition having earned the better of the scoring opportunities.
Throwing Rielly back into the mix seems a risky call, though.
Since coach Craig Berube went to the five-forward unit midway through the regular season, its success has come primarily on the back of Marner’s ability to move the puck decisively from the top of the point — or, as we’ve seen in these playoffs — to fire it into traffic and cause some chaos at the net-front. The Maple Leafs faithful need no reminding of the fact that it was often a different story with No. 44 quarterbacking the unit, the defender more prone to holding onto the puck and assessing his options than whipping it quickly to waiting sticks.
Against a Cats penalty kill that leaves the opposition little time to think, inserting Rielly back up top seems the opposite of what the Maple Leafs’ man-advantage needs. An alternative, though, could be Oliver Ekman-Larsson, who’s amassed nearly 200 career points on the power play himself, knows this Panthers PK group well, and more crucially, has shown an ability to wire pucks through traffic into the area Toronto needs to get to more.
A change doesn’t seem to be coming just yet, though. The Maple Leafs rolled out the five-forward power-play group at Tuesday’s practice, while Ekman-Larsson didn’t skate due to illness.
For the time being, it’s Marner’s unit to run. And the central task at hand for No. 16 is figuring out how to get more pucks to the net next time out.
“Try to get yourself in better areas,” Marner said Tuesday, of how to do that. “I try to get shots — last game they did a good job of blocking them. For myself there, you just try to work around it. You know, I’m trying to find sticks a lot of times, especially on power plays, to cause havoc down low. That’s what my game is.”
Speaking to the media on Monday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., his head coach offered his own assessment.
“Sometimes your top guys, they’re looking to get too good of a chance, instead of just putting the puck on net,” Berube said. “And I think there’s times where we could put more pucks on net — at bad angles, just firing it in there with people going to the net. You never know, it goes off somebody, rebounds, anything like that. I think Mitch could just be a little bit more direct in that area. He has the puck a lot. He’s got to look to put more pucks to the net. I get what he’s trying to do — he wants to upgrade his chance. He’s a passer first, we know that, but we need him to shoot pucks too.”
The body of work the Maple Leafs have come up with on the power play throughout these playoffs makes clear the benefit of taking the more straightforward approach, Toronto having tallied primarily off of rebounds, deflections, and fortuitous net-front bounces.
After Tuesday’s skate wrapped, Berube expanded on the thought, laying out the path to putting that more direct, straightforward offensive approach into action, in the face of the Cats’ relentless kill.
“It’s about getting deliveries quicker,” he said. “Because the pressure’s coming, they’re good at it. So, we could deliver quicker. I thought we missed the net a lot — I think we had 20 missed shots in that game. And I get it, it’s tough sometimes, trying to get it around people. You know, they do a good job.
“We got to the puck on the forecheck, we had a lot of stalls in their zone — we’ve got to get the puck out of those swarms, which will generate more opportunities to get pucks to the net.”
