PITTSBURGH, PA — Whew.
Sweet catharsis.
Long deferred confidence.
For the Toronto Maple Leafs, 60 minutes like Saturday’s has been 11 slogging games in the making.
That’s how far one must track back to find a night (Nov. 5) in which the reeling Leafs got the job done with such relative ease. When their offence clicked to the tune of five-plus goals and they sealed up victory without needing nail-biting overtime heroics.
Postgame music blaring from the dressing room (“Come On Eileen”), Nick Robertson playfully mimicking Dennis Hildeby’s soft-spoken Swedish, and loud high-fives… ah, this is what winning sounds like.
“Yeah, it’s been a long time coming, right?” Max Domi said. “This just does nothing but build a lot of confidence for our group, and we needed it. That’s a good team over there, and we had everyone going tonight. So, huge win.”
Skating in front of their most enthusiastic and voluminous road crowd all season — “Go! Leafs! Go!” chants reigned supreme from the heavy splattering of blue across PPG Paints Arena — the Maple Leafs cruised to a 7-2 wire-to-wire romp over the Pittsburgh Penguins, despite being outshot 35-23.
Granted, they may not have dominated the run of play. But they dominated on the scoreboard and in feel-good storylines.
“Nice to score a couple goals, and win with quite a big lead, which we haven’t done in a long time,” William Nylander said in a fashionable toque. “Lines were clicking and being connected. From the D to the forwards, everything was just flowing better.”
Red-hot Ekman-Larsson solved Penguins backup Arturs Silvos with Toronto’s first puck on net, and by the time the Leafs had registered eight more his way, three more had smashed twine.
Silvos, who couldn’t track the play if you spotted him an AirTag and a couple hound dogs, got chased before the game was 25 minutes old, thwacked his goal stick down the tunnel, and forced Tristan Jarry to take the crease for the second time in less than 24 hours.
Not ideal.
Unless you’re the Maple Leafs, who had as many redemption tales as goal celebrations:
1. Dakota Joshua, scratched Wednesday, flattened Matt Dumba with a tone-setting hit in open ice, scored in tight, and drew a penalty that resulted in a hard-to-come-by power-play goal.
“That’s my goal every night,” Joshua said. “To finally have a game like that feels nice.
“It’s obviously been not ideal to this point. So, to get that result means a lot.”
To Joshua’s teammates, too.
“We see a guy that’s competing like he was, and winning every battle and drawing penalties, scoring goals — he really did it all” Domi said. “So, it’s great to see.”
2. Domi, scratched Saturday for the first time in his Leafs tenure, responded to his coach’s challenge with two primary assists and nice flashes of top-line chemistry.
“That’s what happens when you get scratched,” Nylander said. “You come back with maybe a little bit more fire. He did a great job.”
Berube agreed: “Max was a lot better tonight. Made some nice plays. But he was engaged in the game, just on some forehecks, taking the body, winning the puck battle. Just defensively, working back to our zone, breaking plays up. He was good.”
How difficult was it for Domi to sit one out?
“Not gonna answer anything about that,” he said. “That’s behind us now.”
3. Nylander, a surprise scratch due to illness Saturday, got over his sickness with the quickness and added to his point total.
“Willy’s a gamer. He’s not gonna miss too many games if he can help it,” Berube said. “He gutted through it, and I thought he did a lot of good things with the puck.”
-
-
32 Thoughts: The Podcast
Hockey fans already know the name, but this is not the blog. From Sportsnet, 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas is a weekly deep dive into the biggest news and interviews from the hockey world.
4. Bobby McMann, who’d been mired in another six-game point drought, scored the winner, added an assist and had his legs churning.
5. Robertson, who’d been demoted to the fourth line, snuffed his five-game point drought with one of the prettiest steal-and-snipes you’ll see.
6. Third-string goalie Dennis Hildeby — who’d been solid but without run support in his five previous appearances — finally secured his first win of the season.
“Every time we needed a save, he came up with one. They had a few ice tilts in their favour, and he stood tall for us back there,” Joshua said.
“He’s grown, in a year, a lot,” Berube added. “Got a good future ahead of him.”
7. And captain Auston Matthews scored for the first time since returning from his lower-body injury.
To be sure, when a dozen skaters splash the scoresheet, and seven of them walk out with multi-point nights, the vibes are a little sunnier.
“A lot of secondary scoring tonight, which is good for our team. We need that. It’s not just on three guys or whatever that have been putting points up,” said Berube, who also shouted out a defensive effort that saw Toronto out-block Pittsburgh 26-11.
“It’s confidence. You know, they’re going to feel good about themselves — and that’s good,” Berube said, before adding a caveat. “We got to keep getting better, though.”
No doubt.
But being on the happy side of a blowout before flying to Florida and facing the Panthers for the first time since Game 7 should only juice morale for Tuesday’s revenge match.
“Everybody was clicking,” Nylander said. “We just gotta build off that.”
Fox’s Fast Five
• Big 48 hours for Cowan, sharing his first sheet with Alex Ovechkin and hanging a dash on Sidney Crosby by finishing off a nifty give-and-go with Nylander.
The rookie downplays these events as “just another game,” but… c’mon, really?
“He’s pretty level-headed,” says teammate Dakota Mermis. “Certainly, a high-confidence kid.
“But that’s got to be cool. I mean, it always is. You sometimes try to underplay it, but it’s a cool part of what we get to do. And he may be in shoes where people are looking at him one day across the ice. So, it’s exciting.”
• Saturday marked the Maple Leafs’ fifth back-to-back already this season — but not once have they been at a disadvantage.
In each case, Toronto’s opponent was also on a back-to-back. And with Friday’s 5 p.m. start in Washington, the Leafs arrived in Pittsburgh before the Penguins’ plane touched down from Columbus.
• How impactful has 34-year-old Ekman-Larsson been?
Well, the most productive season of his 16-year career was 2015-16, when he erupted for 55 points in Arizona.
This season the defenceman is humming along at a 66-point clip, while injecting edge and logging heavy minutes. He’s on a nine-game point streak despite being relegated to the second power-play unit.
Appreciate this man.
Ekman-Larsson left the third period with an upper-body injury that Berube hopes isn’t serious.
“He said he’s fine to me,” Nylander diagnosed.
• Nice David Amber sit-down feature with Joshua discussing his battle with cancer:
• Robertson’s boyhood idol was Crosby. And it never gets old going head-to-head.
“I just remember the first time playing against him, I knew this guy my whole childhood, so I was like, Yeah, I’m gonna give him a cross-check,” Robertson says. “I went to give him one, and I kind of went back on my feet. Didn’t realize how strong he was.”
When the Penguins rolled through Toronto in October, Crosby gifted Robertson one of his sticks. Where will it be kept?
“In my house in Michigan, tucked away, where no one can take it.”
