SAN JOSE — A day before the Leafs faced the Sharks, practice was nearly done when a frustrated Sheldon Keefe put a stop to things.
“Everybody in here please,” he said.
The Leafs coach was not happy with what he was seeing. The execution wasn’t there. He voiced his displeasure, urgently. Then, he ran the drill back again. This time it was executed properly. And that was it. Practice was over.
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A day later, his team failed to execute against a Sharks team that’s sitting near the league basement. This, after losses already this season to the Arizona Coyotes and Montreal Canadiens, two teams that finished at the bottom of last season’s standings.
The Leafs have yet to really look like the Leafs this season. Nothing like the team that stacked up a franchise-record 115 points last season. Instead, they’ve looked lost, disjointed, uninspired. Not much is going right at the moment.
“Obviously we want to build traction,” Auston Matthews said after the loss to the Sharks, which came three nights after a dispiriting loss in Vegas. “I just don’t think we’ve really put together a full 60-minute game. I think that consistency within the game and momentum shifts and stuff are kinda hurting us right now.”
The Leafs fell behind 26 seconds into the game in San Jose, and then slipped into a 3-1 hole.
“I think there was just too many ups and downs, not a whole lot of consistency throughout the game,” Matthews went on. “There was times we did some good things obviously, and had some good possession and some good plays offensively. There was also times where we were just a little bit stagnant and couldn’t really get much going.”
Keefe’s lineup shakeup had only a so-so effect.
Alex Kerfoot’s addition to the top line helped spur two goals — one from David Kampf, the team’s unlikely five-on-five goal leader, another from Mitch Marner. It was hardly a dominant outing, though.
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 pinned in their own end for most of the night, to the point that Keefe had to remove both Nylander and Robertson from the line in the third period and replace them — with Kerfoot and Calle Jarnkrok — for defensive zone draws.
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The Tavares line was having to shoulder an unusual share of defensive zone faceoffs because of the lineup restructuring. The coaching staff wasn’t going to send the tough stuff to the line that featured Michael Bunting and Denis Malgin. And they most certainly aimed to get the Matthews’ group on offence as often as possible.
So Tavares and company were tasked with more of that load (38 percent offensive zone faceoff percentage). Shot attempts were 13-4 for San Jose when Tavares, Nylander, and Robertson were on the ice.
Nylander, notably, was held without a shot or attempt. Tavares is still looking for his first five-on-five goal of the season.
“I thought that San Jose’s best players gave us a real hard time today,” Keefe said. “Every time those guys got on the ice they tilted the ice.”
That sounds, in a roundabout way, not unlike 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 winning those minutes.
Keefe may have to go back to the drawing board, whether that’s dropping Michael Bunting back onto the top line 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 lineup.
The only line that should definitely stick for now is the one that reunited Kampf with Pierre Engvall. That unit, with Zach Aston-Reese filling things out, was the most successful group in San Jose. Despite landing only one offensive zone faceoff, the line finished with an expected goals mark approaching 90 percent.
For the second game in a row, the Leafs gave up too much good stuff, too many high-quality opportunities (though two of the four San Jose goals came on one power play).
“We gotta figure out these turnovers,” Marner said. “We’re giving a lot of teams a lot of odd-man rushes, a lot of chances our way. We’re not helping our D a lot, especially forwards. We’re not coming back to pucks. They were way hungrier on the forecheck. That’s the thing that our team has been so good at the last couple years, getting pucks back and creating offence off that. The forward group, we need to get way hungrier on the puck. We need to create way more chances up ice and help our D out a little more.”
“We didn’t play our game the first two periods,” added an unusually outspoken Kampf. “I feel like in the third we came back a little bit and started playing a little bit harder. It wasn’t good all game.”
Keefe has not been happy with the way the puck is moving from the D to the forwards. In other words, how the team is initiating its attack. It’s what, in his estimation, has stalled the offence and led to his team spending more time playing defence.
The Leafs are sitting about 50 percent expected goals for the season. Not great. Last season that number was 56 percent.
“We gotta execute,” Keefe said. “You watch the game, you watch how many times we don’t execute on passes. We’ve got a lot of really good players, a lot of skill on our team, and we’re just not connecting on passes, like, tape-to-tape passes that we’re just either making the wrong decision and passing to the wrong guy, or we’re holding on too long and it gets disrupted. That’s a big problem for us.
“Our inability to move the puck up the ice efficiently is slowing down all of our game on offence and it’s really hurting our game defensively as well because we’re just getting stressed. The second period we couldn’t get our defence off the ice because we just couldn’t move the puck up.”
Though Marner pinned those problems on the forwards, Keefe said, “It starts with the D. Their first touch (with the puck) has to be better.”
The defence looks overexposed right now, with Jake Muzzin and Timothy Liljegren both absent with injuries. That’s two of the usual top six (or seven) out of the mix, including the second-best defender (T.J. Brodie is tops at this point) on the team.
The Leafs have no choice but to continue to lean on a struggling Justin Holl until Liljegren returns next month. They’ll have to find an external replacement for Muzzin if he doesn’t return this season.
Keefe didn’t think changing up the pairs would fix the issues the Leafs were having, but it’s something worth contemplating even if the options aren’t exactly obvious.
First, would be splitting up Morgan Rielly and Brodie in the name of balance.
Option 1: Hand Brodie, the most reliable defender the Leafs have, over to Holl.
But then who plays with Rielly? Rasmus Sandin on his off side?
Option 2: Reunite Brodie and Mark Giordano.
Again though, who plays with Rielly?
Option 3: Keep Rielly and Brodie together, but swap Sandin for Giordano.
Is there enough mobility and puck-moving ability in a Giordano-Holl combo with Holl struggling like he is at the moment? Can the Leafs play Sandin and Mete together?
Option 4: Split up Rielly and Brodie, but go extreme in sliding Rielly over 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 – Mete
Like we said, not a lot of great options there.
It’s evident the Leafs feel there’s only so much they can throw at Giordano. He was supposed to play more in Muzzin’s absence. He’s ended up playing less. That might need to change.
Another issue is that the Leafs’ power play has yet to get going, though Matthews’ one-time blast was encouraging.
About the most positive development of the early season has been the play of Ilya Samsonov. There aren’t a lot of players off to roaring starts. Keefe has felt the need to press hard from Day 1.
It’s been a checkered start, certainly.
It is still October, still 74 games to go, still early. And the Leafs started in similar fashion last season before turning things around.
“It’s not an excuse, right?” Kampf said. “The season started already, so we have to be ready from the start of the season.”
Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick
(Photo: Kavin Mistry / NHLI via Getty Images)
