TORONTO — What most people see when they look at Nazem Kadri’s regular season is a precipitous drop in production: He followed up consecutive 32-goal years for the Toronto Maple Leafs by scoring just 16 times in 2018-19.
What Kadri sees in his own performance, however, is a little more nuanced. He points to a massive improvement in the faceoff circle — he shot up to a 55 per cent success rate, after making that an area of emphasis — and a run of unfavourable puck luck as his primary takeaways from the Opening 82.
“It’s been an unlucky year for me with lots of posts and my shooting percentage being down,” Kadri said Monday. “Could I have easily been in the mid-’20s [in goals]? I think so. But it is what it is and I’m going to try to contribute whatever I can.”
As the Leafs prepare for another first-round meeting with Boston, he is their X-factor.
This team is deepest down the middle and Kadri is a luxury most teams don’t have at third-line centre. There has been a trickle-down effect since the off-season signing of John Tavares, and it should create a different matchup challenge for Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy in this best-of-seven.
He will be most concerned about trying to neutralize the lines centred by Auston Matthews and Tavares at 5-on-5.
That should mean easier competition for Kadri and wingers Patrick Marleau and William Nylander, not to mention more shifts starting in the offensive zone. Those two themes ran consistently through Kadri’s regular season and helped boost his underlying numbers. He saw year-over-year gains in Corsi (53.2 per cent, from 48.4), scoring chance share (54.2 per cent, from 50.7) and goals-for percentage (52.9, from 50.6) while producing more assists and points per 60 minutes played, individually.
In years past, Kadri was Mike Babcock’s preferred shutdown centre. He almost exclusively drew top competition and faced the toughest zone starts of any Leaf in each of the last two playoff series: Seeing just 18 per cent in the O-zone against Washington in 2017 and 21.4 per cent against Boston last spring.
He’ll be up close to the 50 per cent range starting with Game 1 on Thursday night.
Rather than preparing for a healthy dose of Patrice Bergeron and David Krejci this time around, he’s likely going to see Charlie Coyle and Co. And the Leafs are expecting to gain an edge there.
“That’s an important piece for us,” said Babcock. “That’s supposed to be where we have our depth. You’ve got to outplay the guy across from you and you’ve got to be nasty while you do it. And you’ve got to be real solid defensively.
“Those are the things for us that we need from Naz. We’ve talked about it lots. He understands what’s needed.”
Kadri was downright beaming after Monday’s practice, speaking about how addictive he finds the atmosphere and intensity you get during the playoffs. You can count him among the Leafs who thought the regular season dragged on.
The 28-year-old is trying to reach the second round for the first time in his NHL career — only he and Jake Gardiner are left over from the 2013 Leafs team that had the Game 7 collapse in Boston — and he’s planning to make a more positive impact on this series than he managed last April, when he earned a three-game suspension for dangerously boarding Tommy Wingels late in Game 1.
He could only watch as Toronto fell behind 3-1 while rolling out Matthews, Tyler Bozak, Tomas Plekanec and Dominic Moore down the middle. Those were among the final NHL games Plekanec and Moore ever played.
“Honestly I think [the series] was pretty even,” said Kadri. “It was unfortunate missing a few of those games because I felt like maybe it could have been a little bit different.”
As we prepare for the rematch, the talk in Toronto is largely centred around Matthews’ quest for a more productive spring and how Tavares and linemate Mitch Marner might follow their career offensive seasons.
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We all hyper-analyze the stars at this time of year. But a playoff series comes and goes inside a two-week span — much quicker, if it ends shy of seven games — and the intense focus on matchups can see players like Boston’s Jake DeBrusk tip the offensive scales in his team’s direction.
“Often what happens is those [top] guys cancel each other and it’s the rest of the guys that matter,” said Babcock. “I’ve been in a lot of playoff series where your stars had no points after the first round, hardly anything after two rounds, but by the end, they were leading your team in scoring. The other guys got ‘em through.”
On this team, in this moment, Kadri resides outside of the spotlight.
Where he was once central to the Leafs fortunes, he now fills a different role. He can stand behind the franchise pillars and pull on the rope from there. Toronto doesn’t need him to score to finally beat the Bruins, but the odds will go up considerably if he does.
“I’m definitely looking to step it up and hopefully come up big,” said Kadri. “I think that’s important to going deep in the playoffs, is having those unsung heroes and those guys that can contribute.”
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