PHILADELPHIA — Behind the scenes and between the ears, Toronto Maple Leafs players and coaches have been wrestling for solutions to their sluggish starts.
Heading into Philadelphia Wednesday night, the club had yet to score first in any road game and dug itself an early hole in nine out of their first 13 games of the season.
Why is a group that struck first in 34 of 56 games last season beginning so many nights with its feet in the mud?
“It’s a $1-million question,” Sheldon Keefe said. “Coaches will beat yourself up over that — and sometimes players will, too — just trying to figure it out.”
In a venomous Philly barn, where locals loudly chant “Sucks!” after the introduction of each member of the visitors’ starting lineup (Announcer: “Right wing Ondrej Kase.” Crowd: “…sucks!”) and boo their own power-play with lust, falling behind early again could’ve been a recipe for disaster.
“We can’t sit back,” challenged ex-Flyer Wayne Simmonds. “We can’t wait. I feel like we’ve probably done that a little bit too much this year, you know, the feeling-out process. And we don’t want that to be the makeup of our team. We want to go out there and jump on it right away.”
Although it would be difficult to argue that the Leafs jumped all over the Flyers, they held their own without an injured John Tavares in a rather even if uneventful first period and drew first blood in the second.
William Nylander’s all-important deflection off his boot kickstarted the Leafs to a 3-0 victory.
Originally Nylander’s marker was ruled off due to a suspected kicking motion, but that call was correctly overturned upon review.
You can probably guess how the Flyers faithful felt about the flip.
Nylander scored again in the third, wristing a puck clean past Carter Hart on the power-play off a nice backhand feed from Nick Ritchie, promoted to the top PP unit in Tavares’s absence.
For Ritchie, it was just his second point as a Leaf.
For Nylander, he ties Tavares for the team lead in goals (seven) and Leon Draisaitl for the league lead in game-winners (four). He is rolling on a five-game point streak (4-3-7) and now humming along at a 40-goal pace.
Ondrej Kase added an insurance goal late in the third, benefitting from a nice hustle play by Alexander Kerfoot on the forecheck. Kase’s goal ended a 16-goal run during which only the Core Four was finding the back of the net.
Toronto’s penalty kill was superb, and goaltender Jack Campbell, making his 12th appearance already, was stellar in a bounce-back effort.
But with a back-to-back looming this weekend (versus Calgary Friday and at Buffalo Saturday), Tavares’s health will join Campbell’s heavy workload among the Leafs’ concerns.
Fox’s Fast 5
• You gotta feel happy for Tavares’s replacement, Kirill Semyonov. The undrafted 27-year-old moved his young family to Toronto from Omsk this summer to chase a long-deferred NHL dream. After producing nine points in nine games for the AHL Marlies, Semyonov’s dream came true Wednesday.
• With a grand total of one goal this season by Toronto defencemen (Jake Muzzin), Keefe has been investigating the dearth of blue line scoring.
“I’ve looked at a lot of the defence scoring around the league and a lot of it is activating offensively in the offensive zone; it’s on the rush. And our D are just as active if not more than most teams, yet that hasn’t produced the results that we want,” Keefe says. “It is a bit of an oddity.”
• Flyers defenceman Justin Braun registered six blocked shots.
• Ritchie had some excellent chances and a game-high five shots during his promotion to Mitch Marner’s line and on the top power-play unit, but he is still hunting his first goal as Leaf.
“It’s not easy,” Ritchie concedes. “You want to score as many as you can, but it’s not that easy right now, and I got to get back to basics.”
Says Keefe: “We want to make sure we stay on top of him with just the urgency of the situation. It is not so much the fact that he hasn’t scored, but shift to shift, it’s bringing urgency and consistency in his play… We expect a lot more, and we need to get a lot more out of him. Part of that is on him, and part of that is on us to help him get there.”
• Auston Matthews has raised nearly $58,000 for Movember. He has promised to shave off the moustache he’s been rocking since 2019 if that total reaches $134,000.
“It’s really important to me and a really big month,” Matthews said. “I try and have fun with it and raise awareness.
“I hope we reach the goal, though, because I want to see what it looks like without it.”
Hockey icon and facial hair connoisseur @AM34 is putting his muzzy on the line for #menshealth. If he reaches a fundraising goal of $134K in for #Movember: his moustache GOES.
The fate of his moustache lies in your hands. Donate today: https://t.co/7rZMCaOC1A pic.twitter.com/bXsvZ2hPKZ— Movember Canada (@MovemberCA) October 28, 2021
