TORONTO – You wake up and look at the standings and see the Toronto Maple Leafs six points out of a playoff position in the Atlantic Division.
Should you cheer for the team – or play for it – the next thought is bound to be universal: How many have the Leafs already squandered needlessly?
Four? Five? Perhaps even six?
“We have left points out there,” Mike Babcock said Tuesday after they did it yet again.
The veteran coach understands that it’s impossible for any team to run through an 82-game season without coughing up a few hairballs, but this is getting a bit much.
Leading the San Jose Sharks 2-0 with less than half a period to play, they had a strong opponent pinned to the mat and the referee starting his three count. Even after Justin Braun ended Frederik Andersen’s shutout bid by going bar-down with a backhander, the Leafs remained seven minutes from victory on Tuesday night.
“I thought we were in good position after they got the first one,” said Babcock.
Not so.
Mark it down as a 3-2 shootout loss.
By failing to close it out, they dropped to 10-1-5 when leading after two periods this season. That might look respectable at first glance, but it amounts to a .625 winning percentage in those situations – a mark only three NHL teams in the last 11 seasons have finished below.
In fact, the median conversion rate for teams over that period is .864, which means the Leafs would have 3.8 more wins – for argument’s sake, we’ll call it four more points in the standings – if they were simply average at closing out games.
The players don’t need to look at those numbers to understand the amount of opportunity lost. Rookie Zach Hyman, who briefly left Tuesday’s game after blocking a Brent Burns shot before scoring immediately upon his return, was asked if he viewed the blown lead against San Jose in isolation of others that came before it.
“No,” he said. “We’ve got to be better. We’ve got to close out games. We’ve got to stay out of the box. I don’t know how many power plays they had, but they had a bunch and they’re a dangerous unit.
“They scored on the last one and that one hurt us the most. We’ve got to be tighter, we’ve got to be better and close out games.”
It’s worth pausing a moment here to highlight the fact that the biggest surprise of all might be that Toronto has found itself with so many leads in the first place. This outfit bears little resemblance to the one that finished 30th overall a year ago, even if it clearly has plenty of room to grow.
When trying to explain why they’ve let so many winnable games slip away, it’s natural to point to a lineup with eight rookies and an average age of 25.3.
But the truth is much more nuanced than that. Veterans were largely responsible for the six power-play opportunities handed to San Jose. The Leafs also came within a whisker of converting on glorious overtime chances before dropping to 0-4 in shootouts when Mitch Marner, Auston Matthews and Nikita Soshnikov were all stopped by Martin Jones.
There was a lot going on.
“When you lead the game you need to play a little bit smarter, and just put the puck deep,” said veteran Leafs winger Leo Komarov. “Sometimes you (make) mistakes and they score. In the beginning of the season we had a lot of those things. I think we’re doing better now.”
Depending on how masochistic you feel like being, you might also look back to a Morgan Rielly goal that got waved off early in the second period and wonder what could have been.
That was denied because Nazem Kadri was ruled to have interfered with Jones on the play. He was assessed a penalty and watched intently as Eric Furlatt and Dean Morton reviewed it on a challenge from Babcock, but the referees declined to overturn a call that looked questionable at best.
“When he checked the monitor, I was shocked that they called it off,” said Kadri. “I mean, what are you going to do?”
Not much. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve.
Babcock is fond of saying that a team is ultimately what its record says it is. The young Leafs believe they belong in the playoff race, but they’ve got some work to do to make things interesting in the second half.
“We’re playing better every day,” said Komarov. “But still – it sucks to lose games like that.”
