TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs needed a statement game.
Following a trade deadline that brought mostly rumours and question marks, amid a stretch that had seen them drop four of their past five games — including losses to three genuine contenders — and fresh off a missed opportunity to prove themselves against the defending champs, the blue-and-white needed a win. A sign that this group can still be considered among the league’s elite heading into the post-season, despite their recent mediocrity.
Instead, Saturday night under the Scotiabank Arena lights, the Maple Leafs fell flat again, finishing on the wrong end of a Battle of Ontario bout against a surging Ottawa Senators squad that presently looks much more likely to make some real playoff noise.
It was a rerun of the loss the club trudged through Thursday: A wobbly start, a largely lifeless offensive effort overall, ill-timed penalties and poor special-teams play on both side of the puck.
Once again, the Maple Leafs drew first blood, a fantastic individual effort from William Nylander earning Toronto its only promising moment of the night. Before they’d even finished announcing No. 88’s tally, though, the Senators had already answered, Jake Sanderson sniping a quick equalizer past Anthony Stolarz from the left circle.
The Senators even offered up a gift-wrapped opportunity to regain the lead, netminder Linus Ullmark badly misplaying the puck midway through the second period, the sequence ultimately winding up with the puck on Auston Matthews’ stick, and a wide-open net in front of him. But even after the home side accepted and cashed in, it took only minutes for the visitors to pressure Toronto into giving up another equalizer.
In the end, the night was decided the way it has been so many times before for this group — an ill-timed penalty, a game-winning goal from the opposing power play and, of course, a lacklustre effort when Toronto got its own power-play opportunity in crunch time.
As was the case last time out, the Maple Leafs managed a late push, stringing together some decent chances and briefly looking like a legitimate threat. But once again, it simply came too late.
As the dust settled on what wound up a 4-2 Sens win, stretching Toronto’s recent slate to five losses in six games, the Maple Leafs’ bench boss didn’t mince words when asked to assess his group’s play of late.
“I’m concerned, for sure,” said head coach Craig Berube from the bowels of Scotiabank Arena late Saturday. “It’s hockey. There’s certain stretches you go through that it’s not there. You just keep battling away as a coach. You’ve got to hold your players accountable to it. They’ve got to hold themselves accountable to it — they need to make their mind up, in the room, on the importance of the start of the game. And 60 minutes of urgency, details, doing things right, playing our game.
“I didn’t find that we wanted to play our game early enough in this game. We wanted to bring pucks back, and play slow, and try to go through them. We had some chances off the rush, I get it — but you don’t build your game. Third period, we played more north, won more battles, more urgency, and it’s a different period. So, it’s about us getting together here and putting 60 minutes together.”
The numbers tell a similar story. Were you to glance only at the box score, you could come away thinking the Senators had outlasted their provincial rival in a nail-biter, that the Maple Leafs had pressed all night, but simply didn’t get the bounces. But as has been the case lately, the box score doesn’t reflect the reality of what’s playing out on the ice for this team — of how few moments in a game these Maple Leafs truly look like a dangerous team, as opposed to a team housing a few dangerous players.
Saturday night, the Leafs and Senators finished fairly even across a number of offensive metrics, Toronto even earning an edge here and there. Per Sportlogiq, the Maple Leafs had more offensive-zone possession time (6:28 vs. Ottawa’s 5:17), more high-danger chances (eight to Ottawa’s seven), more scoring chances off the cycle (seven to Ottawa’s three) and were nearly level in terms of scoring chances off the rush (five to Ottawa’s six). Toronto was the far better team in terms of its controlled entry success rate (62.9 per cent to Ottawa’s 39.3 per cent) and its controlled exit success rate (88 per cent to Ottawa’s 79.3 per cent).
But there were key red flags, too. Tops among them, the percentage of puck battles won by each club on this night: 72.2 per cent for Ottawa, 27.8 per cent for Toronto.
“Their three goals were all about losing battles inside the blue line. We didn’t win enough battles there,” Berube said of Saturday’s opponent. “It’s urgency for me, and details, in the first two periods that weren’t there. When we decide to have urgency, and do things the right way, we’re a way better team in the third — but you’re behind, and sometimes you don’t come back. We had chances, but that’s what happens.”
Making matters worse, of course, is the calibre of club the Maple Leafs have continued to come up short against lately. After a run of wins in late February, Toronto has lined up across from four genuine playoff teams this month, and lost to all of them: The Vegas Golden Knights (5-2 loss), the Colorado Avalanche (7-4 loss), the Florida Panthers (3-2 loss), and the Senators, Saturday (4-2 loss).
It’s not just the growing pile of L’s — it’s the way this club looks when the pressure ramps up, and the games get tighter. When the regular season begins to give way to the post-season.
“I think the margins have been really small the last couple games,” Matthews said of his club’s recent slide. “I think it’s just details in our game haven’t quite been there. I mean, it’s on us to figure that out and to just be better. We’ve got to get it through our heads that all these games, especially with some of the teams we’re playing, all these games are going to be playoff-like games. These teams are fighting for their lives, they’re trying to make a push — they’re desperate teams, like the one we played tonight. We’ve got to wrap our heads around that, and just be better all around as a team.”
“It’s all over the ice,” added Nylander. “You know, D-zone, power play, PK, O-zone, how we’re playing with the puck. I think everything’s just got to be picked up a notch, and dialled up.
“We’ve just got to simplify and grind a little bit. That’s it.”
For Berube, who made his name by guiding a club through about as significant adversity as you could find — his 2019 St. Louis Blues reaching the Stanley Cup summit in June after ranking last in the league in January — it’s simple.
The battles the Maple Leafs are navigating now are the same ones they’ll be fighting through in April. And progress won’t come until this group figures out how to thrive in that environment.
“These guys, they want to win. Trust me on that. They want to win. There’s a sense of frustration, for sure. We’ve got to look past that,” the coach said Saturday. “We can’t complain about, or get undisciplined because teams are checking us hard. That’s what you’ve got to get through. They checked hard tonight. Florida checked hard. Teams are going to check hard. Every game we play, they’re going to check hard. You’ve got to fight through the check.
“We checked well tonight too, we didn’t give up a ton. But we can do a lot more with the puck, we can make it a lot harder on other teams with the puck. And we’re not right now.”
