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The Maple Leafs came back from 2-0 down only to forfeit a 3-2 lead in the third period versus the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night.

The Leafs have now lost eight of their last eleven (3-6-2) and find themselves sitting fifth in the division as of Sunday morning — one point behind the Florida Panthers (even on games) for third in the Atlantic and one point behind the Boston Bruins (one game in hand) for the second wildcard spot.

Your game in ten:


1. Tonight, in the first period, Ben Smith won and then lost the same faceoff by sending the puck directly to the Ottawa point man, leading to the 2-0 goal by Ryan Dzingel. There were other factors at play there – Morgan Rielly’s struggles to box out/tie up continue – but Smith is winning 47.7% of his shorthanded faceoffs and 46.6% of his defensive zone faceoffs this season. He has four points in 38 games and is 349th of 372 in points-per-60 among forwards with more than 300 even-strength minutes played. His -7.7 CF% relative to his teammates ranks him 365th of 372.

On the penalty kill, Smith’s 4v5 Corsi Against per 60 relative to his teammates is 24.12 – 158th of 159 forwards with more than 50 minutes played at 4v5 (granted, some of that is attributable to Smith always starting his 4v5 shift on the defensive zone draw, rather than changing on the fly following a clearance).

It’s awfully hard to overlook lost draws leading to goals against when it’s seemingly the singular reason why Smith is in the lineup. On Saturday, Mike Babcock admitted that Smith is struggling to get up to speed after his injury layoff and that his skill set will never measure up to his intangibles. When is enough enough?

2. Smith has three more games left before he’s expansion draft eligible (he will hit the 40-game threshold at that point but would need to be signed for next season to be exposed as one of the team’s 40-70 players). It seems odd to think that has anything to do with Babcock’s personnel decisions when the team is in a playoff race, but who knows? We’ll know for sure in three games.

3. Frederik Gauthier wasn’t perfect in his stint with the Leafs – he got cleaned out on a draw himself against Anaheim, directly leading to a goal against – but he showed clear signs of progress in terms of his skating and puck skills, was good on the dot overall (51.2% OA, 57.5% DZ), and he is 21 years old. At the very least, if The Goat makes a costly mistake, there is some sort of long-term growth benefit attached to it as far as his development is concerned.

I understand the logic behind affording Gauthier bigger minutes and more offensive opportunities with the Marlies. But if Goat is realistically going to be a 4C in the long run, learning how to play an effective 10 minutes a night at the NHL level for the rest of the season doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world for his development.

Maybe the best option here is looking for the right answer externally. Perhaps the Leafs take a peak at the new acquisition Sergey Kalinin at some point, although if his faceoff numbers in his first 100+ NHL games are any indication (41.6%), he won’t be able to stick at center for Babcock.

The Leafs probably – and rightfully — will not be shelling out any mid-to-high draft picks on a Brian Boyle-type this deadline, so this may not be something the team fully addresses until the offseason.

4. With all of that out of the way, there are obviously bigger issues with the team than the fourth-line center spot at the moment. Since the loss to St. Louis coming off of the All-Star Break, the Leafs have given up 35.6 shots per game in their last nine. That includes four games in which they’ve given up 40 or more. That is obviously trending in the wrong direction and it comes at a time when Frederik Andersen is showing signs of slowing down. Since his back-to-back shutouts against Detroit and Calgary near the end of January, Andersen has allowed 29 goals on 251 shots against — an .880 save percentage over his past seven starts.

5. The result is that the team has given up 40 goals in its last nine games. This, after entering the All-Star Break having allowed just four goals in the previous four games in what was the team’s best stretch of defensive hockey of the season. If the competition around the league reached a new level coming out of the All-Star Break, the Leafs haven’t been able to adapt to it so far. Now — with the league figuring out what the Leafs are all about and the team losing one of its top forwards for the first time this season — comes the biggest bout of adversity of 2016-17. And the schedule will continue to be unrelenting, starting with another back-to-back with travel in between tomorrow in Carolina.

6. One of the points of interest coming into the game was how the Leafs were going to rejig their powerplay with Mitch Marner out for the weekend. The top unit had Tyler Bozak out on the right half wall where Marner usually operates, and Josh Leivo roving in the high slot. Overall — not surprisingly — that unit looked like it missed its quarterback.

7. Before the game, Babcock said that he doesn’t necessarily prefer Matthews and Nylander together but that he knows Nylander wants to be on Matthews’ wing and suggested Nylander prove he should be there. That was a clear challenge issued and Babcock got the response he wanted with a fantastic game from the duo.

The pair finished the game with a 63% possession share; Matthews won the possession battle heavily in his matchup against the Sens’ number-one center, Kyle Turris (6:28 head to head, 71% CF for Matthews) and the duo also dominated the Sens’ top D pairing of Erik Karlsson and Marc Methot to the tune of a 75% share of the shot attempts in their five minutes head to head. The pair created two goals — Morgan Rielly’s at evens and Nylander’s on the powerplay.

Babcock’s logic for keeping the two apart was to avoid having two players on the same line who want to be the triggerman, but an insanely-talented leftie/rightie duo ripping passes and playing catch with one another is very dynamic and there is obvious chemistry here — that is of no surprise given both are highly-skilled playmakers as well as elite shooters. Matthews has now assisted on nine of Nylander’s 16 goals this season.

8. Since Mike Babcock took over the coaching duties for the Maple Leafs, he has set Morgan Rielly on a program to learn how to defend properly: how to better use his stick to disrupt plays, how to gap up better off the rush, how to use his angles, how to box out, how to receive a forecheck properly, and how to read/react correctly. The progress in some of these areas has been slow if not stagnant as Rielly tries to evolve his defensive game while scaling back the amount of puck rushing and powerplay time.

While Rielly is unquestionably further ahead as a ‘complete defenceman’ than he was before Babcock arrived in Toronto, he is now inching towards the 300-game mark (currently at 287) that is generally used as a measuring point to gauge defencemen. It seems worth pointing out that a lot of his learning years as a Leaf were spent on awful defensive teams, which probably encouraged some bad habits that are presently being worked out of his game. The 300-game rule isn’t scientific by any stretch and every player’s development is different.

Still, it’s hard to imagine that the management and coaching staff are satisfied with Rielly’s current projection as an elite-skating offensive defenceman whose shot doesn’t scare many goalies in the league and who has difficulty taking care of his own end. It’s not uncommon for defencemen to figure it out later on in their careers; Rielly could be one of those players should he learn to take advantage of his physical gifts defensively.

9. The discussion from the past few days has centered around which players need to step up in Mitch Marner’s absence. The right place to look is in the direction of the two veteran members of the line Marner drives on a nightly basis. We saw a lot of early zone departures, airmail plays and long-bomb passes in search of the quick break from that line tonight and it almost always didn’t work against the Sens’ tighter neutral zone; combine that with many lost puck battles and it resulted in a miserable night in the possession game. Bozak finished with a team-low (among forwards) 33% CF. A look at their ice time of late suggests Babcock’s trust in the JVR and Bozak pairing at even strength is waning — and with good reason.

10. Crazy fact of the night courtesy of @AdnanonMuFC — the Leafs, who lost the season series to the Senators tonight (1-1-2), held the lead in all four of those games with 15 minutes left in the third period.


Game Flow


Shot Attempts Heatmap


Game In Six


 Post-Game: Mike Babcock