Randy Carlyle shrugged. Uncomfortably.
“It’s what the players want,” he said weakly.
The issue was that his Maple Leafs, once again on Thursday morning, preferred the pre-game skate before that evening’s game against the New Jersey Devils to be an optional affair.
Come if you feel like it.
Carlyle made it clear that wasn’t his preference, that he believed there was great value in a full complement of players for the morning ritual.
But he had acquiesced to the wishes of the players, most of whom make more money than he does, most of whom don’t find their job security questioned when the team is unsuccessful.
And so, on a team loaded almost exclusively with players who have never won anything in the NHL, they call the tune.
And Thursday night the notes were all sour.
It never fails to surprise, folks, the way in which complacency comes so easily to a hockey club that has had very little of substance to brag about for more than four decades. Winning games never seems to create an insatiable appetite for more winning in a market that accepts less.
More NHL on Sportsnet:
Subscribe: Rogers GameCentre Live
Rogers Hometown Hockey | Broadcast Schedule
Sportsnet Fantasy Hockey Pool
Twenty-five years of covering these blokes, and it’s been the same story year after year. Only Pat Burns’ Leafs of the second half of the 1992-93 season and the first half of the next campaign were a team I can remember that didn’t quickly grow complacent within a hockey market that treats them as conquering heroes if they manage a two-game winning streak.
And that team ultimately got Burns fired and lost its will to win, too.
This year’s Leafs, after grabbing nine of a possible 10 points in their previous five contests, surely looked complacent skating out against the Devils, a team with one win in eight games, a team with miserable scoring problems, a team that didn’t have two of its best offensive players in Jaromir Jagr and Patrick Elias, as well as young defender Adam Larsson and four other regulars.
Even the legendary Martin Brodeur was, symbolically, far away in Nashville, dropping a decision in his first game ever playing for a team other than New Jersey.
The Devils seemed like a sad shell of a team.
They hurriedly called up forward Mike Sislo from Albany during the day to make sure they had a 20-man squad to send out on to the Air Canada Centre ice surface, but with the way the game went, they probably could have won with 18 players. Or fewer.
The Leafs started snoozily, as though they would be able to get away with less than their best, and ended up paying a big price for it with a 5-3 defeat.
Last year, it was the loosey-goosey way in which the Leafs played the game that had many suggesting it would all catch up to them by the end of the season.
This year, it’s sure starting to look as if eventually Toronto will rue the way in which it has squandered so many home starts this fall.
Thursday’s game was the Leafs’ 16th home game. No NHL club has had more, and several of the clubs likely to be battling with the Leafs for a wild card playoff spot have played fewer. Seven of those Toronto home games have produced regulation defeats and no points, a regrettable mark surpassed by only awful Columbus and horrible Edmonton.
Eighteen points in 16 home games? That’s not likely to cut it.
Meanwhile, the Leafs have played just nine road games, the only team other than the New York Rangers yet to hit the double digit mark for away contests.
The only way that home-away disparity isn’t going to hit the Leafs, and hit them hard, is if they become an excellent road squad the rest of the way.
Which, theoretically, could happen.
But if it doesn’t, and if the Leafs again miss the post-season, remember this early December loss to the Devils, which you could argue was just as flaccid a performance as the 9-2 loss to the Predators late last month.
At least Nashville went into that game as one of the NHL’s best teams. New Jersey? Not even close. In fact, coach Peter DeBoer mused in the morning that his team was “sort of where (the Leafs) were after that Nashville game.”
In great distress, in other words. But instead of pouncing on a weakened opponent, the Leafs sauntered out with little or no intensity. The line of Phil Kessel, Tyler Bozak and James van Riemsdyk did nothing until it didn’t matter. Jonathan Bernier was very ordinary in facing 26 shots, just as he’s been very ordinary much of the season.
Some of the improved depth showed up, as Mike Santorelli, Nazem Kadri and Daniel Winnik played well. But Korbinian Holzer, the injury fill for Roman Polak, demonstrated why he has trouble staying in the NHL for longer than brief stretches, and the absence of Leo Komarov seemed to have a dulling effect on the entire lineup.
You could tell in the morning that Carlyle was biting his lip over his players insistence that they didn’t need a pre-game skate to prepare adequately. You know that he knows just how easily Leaf teams and Leaf players get satisfied.
But this group of players who have never won seem to be in charge. They salute the fans when they feel like it, and put their hard hats on when the mood strikes.