One could argue that the healthy scratching of a fourth-line center dominating the storylines in Toronto tonight (and probably the hockey world in general) is typical Leafs fan mania. But there is a broader context to the controversy, and the frustration from sections of the fan base with Sheldon Keefe’s pre-game quotes on Saturday is understandable.
The comments were suspect and the optics weren’t great a few hours later after a 3-2 loss in which Leafs PK conceded twice and the ice-time allocation was eyebrow-raising. Your game in 10:
1. As far as the actual game goes, it was a “schedule loss” situation against a rested top-end opponent in a tired situation, but the Leafs were competitive and battled throughout. All three periods were fairly evenly played with scoring chances coming at a premium. The Leafs didn’t create enough against Carolina’s committed team defense at five-on-five, couldn’t come close to solving Carolina’s elite PK, and broke down for two power-play goals against which decided the game.
The Leafs created a couple of chances breaking in alone off the rush — one for Matthew Knies in the second period and one for Morgan Rielly in the first; both lacked finishing quality — but they struggled to break through the Canes defense with much frequency. All in all, it felt a little bit like the loss to the Rangers a few weeks ago at the SBA (minus the funky goals against) — there was not much between the teams at five-on-five, and the special teams decided the outcome.
Sheldon Keefe mostly praising the effort after the game didn’t come as a surprise. At five-on-five, the Leafs didn’t give up many free chances in behind the defense, which has clearly been the point of emphasis for the coach of late. The Canes were credited with a total of four high-danger chances at five-on-five, which ties the Leafs’ best mark of the season.
2. It’s going to be overstated how much David Kampf’s absence may have contributed to the PK goals against in this game, although it can’t go completely unmentioned that Kampf is the team’s top forward PK regular alongside Mitch Marner and the Leafs were up against a dangerous power-play unit tonight.
On the 1-0 goal in the first period, coming about 30 seconds into the Carolina PP after a bad penalty by Matthew Knies, Calle Jarnkrok failed to get a puck out on the wall due to a strange bounce off the dasher. Simon Benoit left the front of the net to contest the puck on the backboards and didn’t disrupt the pass out front, and Noah Gregor didn’t react in time to negate the obligatory Michael Bunting goal in his return to T.O.
The second Carolina power-play goal in the second period (after a really soft holding call on Max Domi) came out of nothing after an initial clearance by the Leafs. The Leafs did a good job of not giving up many free looks at five-of-five, but this was definitely a free look on the PK.
On the entry defense, instead of protecting the middle ice before closing off the puck carrier just inside the blue line (thus protecting against the play through the middle and allowing numbers to get back to defend against the in-zone setup), TJ Brodie took a haphazard swing at the puck over by the boards in the neutral zone and couldn’t prevent the pass from getting through. It created a fast-developing odd-man rush type of situation that Jake McCabe and Marner didn’t scramble to defend well at all.
It was just the latest of too many mind-boggling plays and decisions so far this season from Brodie, who was once the perennial Steady Eddy of the Leafs blue line.
3. In the previous three seasons, TJ Brodie played the second most of any Leaf (second to Morgan Rielly) at five-on-five and the Leafs out-scored the opposition by 44 goals in those minutes with strong underlying numbers across the board. He was a +29 in his minutes with Matthews on the ice over those three seasons and a +13 without Matthews on the ice (and still above water in the possession and scoring chance metrics without #34).
This season, Brodie is again the Leafs’ second-most-played player at five-on-five but is a minus-two and is underwater in the possession and xGF metrics. He is a +5 with Matthews on the ice at five-on-five but a -7 without him. Some of it might be due to fewer “checkers” down the Leafs’ lineup and the overall team performance defensively, but Brodie’s quality of play is playing a notable role here.
On the PK, Brodie played the second most on the team outside of Justin Holl between 2020-2023. He went from allowing 6.35 GA/60 and 5.94 xGA/60 on the PK over those three seasons to 8.89 GA/60 and 8.47 xGA/60 so far this season.
Brodie’s quiet game in a big role was easy to take for granted over the years. A big step back from a player counted on so heavily at five-on-five and on the PK is going to be hard felt and it has been so far this year for the Leafs. It started to noticeably slip in the playoffs last spring, and it’s gotten worse through 34 games this season. A reduction in minutes — his TOI is actually up to 21:55/game this season — has to be on the table regardless, but it’s obvious that part of the solution will require additional credible options beyond what is in the organization currently.
4. The positives in the game offensively for the Leafs were the two goals from their third line in the third period and a defenseman getting in on the action offensively.
Five minutes into the third period, Timothy Liljegren scored his first goal of the year and picked up his fourth point in the last five games. At a time when the Leafs needed to start to really push while down 2-0, Liljegren showed good instincts to drift across the zone into space. Max Domi picked him out with a perfect pass off the wall, and the finish from Liljegren was excellent (his shot will catch you by surprise at times).
Excluding Morgan Rielly, nine defensemen have appeared in a game for the Leafs this season representing a total of 172 man games played. This was just the fourth goal of the season from those defensemen not named Rielly. Liljegren is now tied for second on the Leafs’ defense in goal-scoring with one.
5. The top line’s shift after the Leafs’ 2-1 goal was not a positive one in terms of building on the momentum. A few minutes after the Liljegren goal, though, the Leafs got an opportunity to tie the game on a power play stemming from a tripping penalty drawn by Noah Gregor.
Gregor’s speed, willingness to get his sweater dirty, and motor to keep his feet moving have helped him draw nine penalties so far this season, which is tied with Marner for the most on the team in around half of the ice time.
While Bunting’s act wore thin on the referees in his second year in Toronto and his penalty differential wasn’t too far above breakeven, he was their most effective player at drawing calls in his time here and drew far more than he took in his first season as a Leaf. The team’s power-play opportunities per game are slightly down from three per game in 2022-23 (18th) to 2.97 per game (25th) so far this season, but Gregor has helped the cause for a Leafs team that has an elite power play but doesn’t get to use it often enough.
6. To me, the Leafs’ power play in the third period was an opportunity to call an audible and switch it up by maybe moving Max Domi onto the top unit; he was starting to really come on with a nice pass for the 2-1 goal and seemed hungry for more (he later laid a big hit and then set up the garbage-time 3-2 goal as well).
I don’t see this as throwing in the towel on the PP just to send a message, either; there is plenty of high-end talent on the top unit and Domi is a high-end passer who has played a ton of PP minutes in the league. Mitch Marner — who really stretched his PP shift earlier in the game to the detriment of the team — continued to struggle with turnovers before taking a penalty himself a few minutes after the Leafs’ PP expired.
7. Part of it was uncharacteristically fighting the puck, but in some ways, this game reminded me of why Marner, in particular, can struggle to impact the game as effectively at five-on-five once inside playoff-style hockey against elite competition.
Facing persistent puck pressure in all three zones — consistent back pressure + tight gaps from the D off the rush, organized layers of d-zone coverage inside the blue line — there is little time and space to curl up, take the extra second in possession, and work the puck through seams east-west. Sometimes Marner just flipped pucks in deep tonight, but when he tried to make plays, there were countless turnovers throughout the game. A tight-checking game against a good defensive team isn’t easy on anybody and few players produce at the same rate in the playoffs as the regular season, but we’ve seen Marner, in particular, struggle to adapt his game in this kind of environment before.
8. After the Sebastian Aho empty-netter all but sealed the result, Nick Robertson scored a consolation goal — off a pretty setup in front of the net by Max Domi — with under 10 seconds left in the game. The final faceoff felt like a borderline troll job by Sheldon Keefe in light of his pre-game “accountability” comments.
The third line created both goals in this game. The power play unit accomplished nothing on the PP or at 6-on-5. Down a goal on a center-ice faceoff with nine seconds to go, the odds of winning the game even with McDavid, Matthews, MacKinnon, Kucherov, Pastrnak, and Makar on the ice would be sub 1%. Keefe still couldn’t bring himself to keep the top group off the ice or maybe reward those who produced in the third period by keeping the other unit on.
9. When I make the point about Marner or another of the team’s star player’s TOI on Twitter or elsewhere, a common rebuttal is that maximizing their minutes maximizes the team’s chances of winning. This is true generally. It goes without saying that if the Leafs played Marner as much or less than their lesser players on a semi-frequent basis, this obviously would hurt the team and would be unwise. But there are nights when your best/most talented players simply aren’t your best players on the ice.
In addition to instilling a real sense of accountability within the team environment, empowering those who are going that night is a “feel” call within a game that a good coach should have in his arsenal when searching for a spark. This isn’t to say Marner should’ve played 14 minutes when chasing the game, but throwing #16 over the boards to continuously throw pucks away in 23+ minutes of TOI is certainly not my idea of “accountability” and also probably wasn’t helping the team win the game tonight.
There reaches a tipping point within a game (and in terms of the individual ice time) where it goes from allowing a really talented player play his way through it while hoping for a difference-making moment of magic, to banging your head against the wall, sending the wrong message to the team, and refusing to reward the more deserving players.
10. I’ll leave you with the following comments from Jon Cooper when he benched an entire line of elite players — Brayden Point, Nikita Kucherov, and Steven Stamkos — for the full third period against Buffalo last season.
“As coaches, you got to put your team in the best position to win. 99.9 percent of the time, those guys give us the best chance to win when they’re on the ice. I just felt for the third period, they weren’t giving us the best chance to win.”
The Lightning were down 4-1 entering the third — they gave up another goal just seconds into the final frame on the PK, making it 5-1 — and Cooper leaned heavily on the likes of Alex Killorn, Brandon Hagel, Nick Paul, and his depth players the rest of the way. Killorn scored twice to make a game of it but Tampa couldn’t erase the four-goal lead. The Lightning lost 6-0 the next night to Carolina while tired in a back-to-back situation but then went on a 5-1-1 run.
It’s pointless to debate whether Tampa maybe could’ve come back in that game with their three stars on the ice, whether it really worked given the team’s 6-0 loss the next night, or if the 5-1-1 turnaround was a sign that the message indeed resonated. But this is a championship coach calling out his multiple-Cups-winning stars and backing it up with reduced ice time.
I’m by no means calling for that sort of drastic action in tonight’s game specifically — merely for Marner not to play 23:13 on a night when he clearly didn’t have it. It is not radical or unheard of for ice time to reflect performance level to some degree, even if star players naturally/rightfully earn more shifts and more leeway. The balance often seems too far out of whack under Keefe.
I’d also argue that scratching Kampf in large part due to an offensive-zone turnover in Columbus (leading a soft tying goal against Samsonov) after playing Marner for 20 minutes in a 9-3 blowout loss in Buffalo — a game in which he caused a goal against by turning the puck over in the defensive zone with a blind between-the-legs pass; he didn’t miss a shift afterward — is not an effective form of accountability.
On the HNIC intermission panel, Kevin Bieksa literally laughed at the idea that this Kampf healthy scratch would “send a message,” which was not an unwarranted reaction. Proper accountability has to start at the top.
Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)
At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.
“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”
The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.
Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.
“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and authorChristoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”
Not everyone agrees.
English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.
“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”
“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”
That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”
While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.
And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.
Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.
“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”
For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.
Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.
Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.
Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”
The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.
The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.
Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.
That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.
“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.
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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.
TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.
Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.
McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.
The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.
“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”
The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.
“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”
The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.
McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.
“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”
McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.
“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”
Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.
“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.
“Works his butt off.”
ON TARGET
Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.
“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”
WAKE-UP CALL
Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.
“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”
PATCHES SITS
Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.
“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
