SUNRISE, Fla. — I couldn’t take my eyes off Justin Holl and Travis Dermott.
And I barely noticed Aleksander Barkov and Jonathan Huberdeau.
And I don’t understand the previous two sentences in any meaningful sporting way.
Some nights, the National Hockey League doesn’t make a whole lot of hockey sense. Some nights, two of the stars of the league can be erased by a pair of defencemen hardly anyone has heard of.
On Thursday night, in the middle of nowhere, the broken-down, under-manned, barely experienced defence of the Toronto Maple Leafs did more than their jobs. They led. They mattered. They made plays. They killed penalties. They limited their mistakes.
And the biggest thing is they won. In Florida. Holl had an empty-net goal on Toronto’s final score of the night and an assist on the first score. A two-point night for Holl. A no-point night for Barkov and Huberdeau. A pair of plus-two defencemen for the Leafs. The great Barkov line was a combined zero goals, no assists, minus-6, see you later for the Florida Panthers in what may have been the Leafs’ most important, most significant win of this season teetering on ruins.
They are four points ahead of the Panthers now in the race for one playoff position in the Atlantic Division. The Leafs have 17 games to play. Joel Quenneville’s Panthers have 18 to go. Toronto came into the state of Florida having lost to a Zamboni driver, having lost Jake Muzzin after losing Morgan Rielly, having such disarray on the back end that coach Sheldon Keefe went with seven defencemen because he wasn’t sure which six he could trust.
And he wasn’t sure — how could he be sure? — of what he would get from Holl or Dermott. Holl, the non-prospect, late-blooming, seemingly dependable defenceman. Paired with Dermott, the full-of-promise, emotional, struggling, occasionally immature talent, trying to understand that less is more. This is not the first pairing of your dreams, not Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook playing together in their primes on Quenneville’s Stanley Cup teams in Chicago.
But they played with fight and spirit and smarts and this duo somehow found a way to get the job done. Somehow. They grew an inch or two in size the other night in Tampa when they played most of the final seconds and hung on, barely, for a Leafs win against the powerful Lightning and then grew some more Thursday night at the BB&T Center, where Leafs fans come to get sunburned and celebrate. Normally, it can be just the sunburn. Thursday night, they got both.
Toronto was down 3-1 just 12:36 into the game. It looked like it was going to be one of those nights, the kind the Leafs have had too many of. And when Frederik Andersen let in a dreadful goal, the kind a Zamboni driver might stop, well, recovery didn’t seem likely.
But late in the second period, with the scored tied 3-3, the Leafs killed a penalty that gave them a certain lift heading into the third period. It’s one thing for this defensively challenged team to kill a penalty on its own. It’s another to kill one with Muzzin out for a month and Martin Marincin, a penalty-killer of some quality, in the box.
So Keefe did what he managed in Tampa on Tuesday. Late in the game, he went to, and struggled with, Holl and Dermott for the entire two minutes of a second-period power play. And after William Nylander gave Toronto its first lead of the night, 4-3 with 11 minutes to play in the third period, Keefe again went back to Holl and Dermott because, really, he had nowhere else to turn.
Again, the pair was sound and smart, and it was Holl who battled to find the puck in his end, knocked it out and watched it roll all the way down the ice and into the empty Florida goal. That was the night, the game, the win.
Barkov and Huberdeau had two shots on goal. Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner 11. On the ice, you could excuse the Leafs for laughing just a little late, and mostly to themselves, after Holl’s puck rolled in, an empty-net curling out-turn of sorts. They haven’t had a lot of time to exhale and laugh this season. But the moment meant something to a team in need of more good moments.
“The boys were definitely laughing after that one,” said Dermott, talking about the goal scored by his partner.
The two played together on the Marlies championship run of two years ago. Since then, Dermott was supposed to become a difference-maker and Holl was banished by previous coach Mike Babcock to a place on Robidas Island — without the island.
For the past year and a bit, Dermott had struggled to find his confidence, to be a solid third-pair defenceman who could be trusted by his coaches.
He looked for a while liked he was regressing, as if his career wasn’t heading where it was expected to head. And now when Keefe had to find someone to rely on, someone to trust, he turned to Holl and Dermott.
For now, for this night, for Tuesday night in Tampa, he mixed and matched these two together — and maybe, waiting for Muzzin to return, waiting for Rielly to return, this makes the Leafs deeper and stronger overall.
For one night, maybe two, Holl and Dermott became difference-makers.
“Everyone,” said Zach Hyman, “is cheering for these guys. We need them. We need them now.”
ssimmons@postmedia.com
