SAN JOSE — A day before the Leafs faced the Sharks, practice was almost over when a frustrated Sheldon Keefe called a halt.
“Everyone here please,” he said.
The Leafs coach wasn’t happy with what he saw. The execution was not there. He expressed his displeasure, urgently. Then he started the exercise again. This time it was executed correctly. And that was it. The training was over.
A day later, his team failed to perform against a Sharks team that sits near the league basement. This, after losses already this season against the Arizona Coyotes and the Montreal Canadiens, two teams that finished at the bottom of last season’s standings.
The Leafs haven’t quite looked like yet leaves this season. Nothing like the team that racked up a franchise-record 115 points last season. Instead, they seemed lost, disjointed, uninspired. Not much is happening right now.
“Obviously we want to create traction,” Auston Matthews said after the loss to the Sharks, which came three nights after a disheartening loss in Vegas. “I just don’t think we’ve really put on a full 60 minute game. I think the consistency in the game and the momentum changes and all that is hurting us a bit right now.
The Leafs fell behind 26 seconds into the game in San Jose, then slid down a 3-1 hole.
“I think there were too many ups and downs, not a lot of consistency throughout the game,” Matthews continued. “There were times when we did good things obviously, and had good possession and good plays offensively. There were also times when we were just a little stagnant and couldn’t really get things done.
Keefe’s lineup reshuffle had only an average effect.
The addition of Alex Kerfoot to the front row helped boost two goals – one from David Kampf, the team’s unlikely five-goal point guard, another from Mitch Marner. It wasn’t a dominant outing, however.
As Matthews noted, the Leafs struggled to turn one good shift into another.
More concerning was how things went for the one line that remained intact: the trio of John Tavares, William Nylander and Nick Robertson.
They were stuck in their own end for most of the night, to the point that Keefe had to pull Nylander and Robertson off the line in the third period and replace them – with Kerfoot and Calle Jarnkrok – for defensive zone draws.
The Tavares line was expected to take an unusual share of defensive-zone faceoffs due to roster restructuring. The coaching staff weren’t going to send the tough stuff to the line which included Michael Bunting and Denis Malgin. And they were most certainly aiming to bring Matthews’ group on the attack as often as possible.
Thus, Tavares and company were tasked with more of that charge (38% face-off percentage in the offensive zone). Shot attempts were 13-4 for San Jose when Tavares, Nylander and Robertson were on the ice.
Nylander, in particular, was detained without blow or attempt. Tavares is still looking for his first five-a-side goal of the season.
“I thought the best players in San Jose gave us a hard time today,” Keefe said. “Every time these guys got on the ice, they tilted the ice.”
It sounds, in a roundabout way, a bit like the message Keefe delivered after the loss to the Coyotes. San Jose’s best players — Logan Couture, Erik Karlsson, Timo Meier — were all playing against the Leafs’ best players — and earning those minutes.
Keefe may have to go back to the drawing board, whether it’s bringing Michael Bunting back to the front row or finding a different look for the Tavares group. It’s probably time to give Nicolas Aube-Kubel another look at the bottom of the formation.
The only line that should definitely hold for now is the one that brought Kampf together with Pierre Engvall. This unit, with Zach Aston-Reese filling things in, was San Jose’s top performing group. Despite landing a single faceoff in the offensive zone, the line ended with an expected goal score approaching 90%.
For the second game in a row, the Leafs gave up too many good things, too many high-quality chances (although two of San Jose’s four goals came on the power play).
“We need to understand these turnovers,” Marner said. “We give a lot of teams a lot of odd runs, a lot of chances our way. We don’t help our D much, especially the forwards. We are not going back to pucks. They were much hungrier on the forecheck. That’s the thing our team has been so good at over the past two years, getting pucks and creating offense from that. The forward group, we need to be a lot more puck hungry. We need to create a lot more chances on the ice and help our D a little more.”
“We didn’t play our game the first two periods,” added an uncharacteristically outspoken Kampf. “I feel like in the third we came back a bit and started playing a bit stronger. It wasn’t good the whole game.
Keefe isn’t happy with the way the puck moves from the D to the forwards. In other words, how the team launches its attack. This, he says, has blocked the attack and led his team to spend more time playing defense.
The Leafs are sitting at about 50% of expected goals for the season. Not great. Last season, that number was 56%.
“We have to execute,” Keefe said. “You watch the game, you watch how many times we don’t execute passes. We’ve got a lot of really good players, a lot of talent on our team, and we just don’t connect on passes, like tape-to-tape passes that we just make the wrong call and go to the wrong person, or we we hang on too long and it gets disturbed. This is a big problem for us.
“Our inability to move the puck effectively on the ice is slowing down our whole game on offense and it’s also hurting our defensive game a lot because we’re starting to get stressed. In the second period, we couldn’t get our defense off the ice because we just couldn’t move the puck up.
Although Marner pinned those issues on forwards, Keefe said, “It starts with the D. Their first contact (with the puck) needs to be better.”
The defense looks overexposed at the moment, with Jake Muzzin and Timothy Liljegren both injured. That’s two of the usual top six (or seven) in the mix, including the second-best defender (TJ Brodie is leading at this point) in the team.
The Leafs have no choice but to continue to rely on a struggling Justin Holl until Liljegren returns next month. They will have to find an external replacement for Muzzin if he doesn’t return this season.
Keefe didn’t think changing pairs would solve the Leafs’ problems, but it’s something worth considering even if the options aren’t exactly obvious.
First, would separate Morgan Rielly and Brodie in the name of balance.
Option 1: Return Brodie, the Leafs’ most reliable defenseman, to Holl.
But then who is playing with Rielly? Rasmus Sandin on his side?
Option 2: Reunite Brodie and Mark Giordano.
Again, who plays with Rielly?
Option 3: Keep Rielly and Brodie together, but trade Sandin for Giordano.
Is there enough mobility and puck-moving ability in a Giordano-Holl combo with Holl struggling like he’s currently doing? Can the Leafs play Sandin and Mete together?
Option 4: Separate Rielly and Brodie, but take it to the extreme by sliding Rielly to the right side until Liljegren is ready to play. Rielly, remember, spent time on the right during training camp as well as the offseason.
Giordano Rielly
Brodie Holl
Sandin – Weather
Like we said, there aren’t a lot of good options out there.
It’s obvious the Leafs feel like there’s not much they can do about Giordano. He was supposed to play more in Muzzin’s absence. He ended up playing less. That may need to change.
Another problem is that the Leafs’ power play hasn’t started yet, although Matthews’ one-time outburst was encouraging.
The most positive development at the start of the season was Ilya Samsonov’s play. There aren’t a lot of players going off with a bang. Keefe felt the need to press hard from day 1.
It was a rocky start, certainly.
We are still in October, still 74 games to play, still early. And the Leafs started the same way last season before turning things around.
“That’s no excuse, is it?” Kampf said. “The season has already started, so we have to be ready from the start of the season.”
Statistics and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick
(Photo: Kavin Mistry/NHLI via Getty Images)
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