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Improving team defence still a work in progress for Maple Leafs
They did it again.
Outshot 42-27 and out-chanced – especially early on, the Toronto Maple Leafs won their league leading 13th game when ending up on the wrong side of the shot-counter with a 6-2 victory over the Anaheim Ducks on Tuesday.
Buoyed by Jonathan Bernier’s stellar 40-save performance and timely goals scored by all four lines, the Maple Leafs are now 10-1-1 since losing 9-2 on home ice to the Nashville Predators a month ago.
“I think we were very opportunistic tonight,” Maple Leafs' head coach Randy Carlyle said of his team that chased Ducks goaltender Frederik Andersen from the game in the third period after scoring four goals on their first 20 shots. “(I don’t think) we are going to take that to the bank and say “Hey - we felt good about ourselves,”… we didn’t seem to have any energy in our forecheck – we were receiving and then we stopped skating but we won.”
Even the most optimistic Maple Leaf fan has to forgive Carlyle if he comes across like a wet blanket when the team has been on fire.
Carlyle, as his team should be, is well aware that last season they were winning despite porous team defense and as the story goes - it was eventually their undoing.
Although there are encouraging signs this season, namely offense from a deeper forward pool and great goaltending, there is an obvious need to get better defensively as the mid-way point of the season approaches.
Bernier and James Reimer have been sizzling in net, Bernier’s play against Anaheim was just the latest example.
No. 45 was in top-notch form stopping 30-of-31 shots through two periods, allowing his team to hold on to a 2-1 lead before they broke the game open with goals from David Booth and Nazem Kadri less than a minute apart early in the third period.
“Bernier made some big stops for us early in the hockey game and it seemed like we weathered a little bit of a storm, we’d get a chance and we’d score, so it made us feel good about ourselves,” Carlyle said. “He was the main reason we got ourselves in the position to win the hockey game.”
Bernier must be getting used to this.
It is the second time he has faced over 40 shots in his past 4 starts, and he has won both of them. The Maple Leafs have allowed 40 or more shots 7 times this season and moved from 26th to 27th in the NHL with 33.8 shots allowed per game.
How long can he - and Reimer for that matter - keep it up?
While the barrage continues, the team’s adherence to Carlyle’s message of keeping the opposition to the periphery is still a work in progress.
“We gave up a lot of shots today but we felt that we kept them to the outside quite a bit,” said Joffrey Lupul, who was arguably the Maple Leafs’ best defensive forward on the night and also added a goal. “They are a big strong team, they go to the net hard - so it wasn’t easy.”
Carlyle matched Kadri and Peter Holland in a “two pronged” approach to effectively neutralize Ryan Getzlaf. The tandem held the elitle centreman to one assist and a -1 rating.
“There’s always room to improve. Obviously the shot totals have got to get down. But the way that Bernier has been playing – he’s got those,” said Kadri with a smile. “We are a team that can score obviously but we constantly gotta’ preach and work on our defensive zone play and our neutral zone play and that has taken huge strides in the right direction but always can be better.”
Kadri’s commitment to playing at both ends of the ice has been increasingly evident over their current six-game winning streak.
Phil Kessel scored his 16th and 17th goals of the season late in the third period as the Maple Leafs continue to light the lamp this season. They now lead the league with an average of 3.45 goals per game.
“Right now we are scoring quite a bit of goals and you know when you are scoring quite a bit of goals like this you are going to win a lot of hockey games,” Kessel said. “Hopefully they keep coming.”
Carlyle hopes the commitment to team defence comes along with it.
Follow Neil Acharya on Twitter: @Neil_Acharya
