TORONTO — Jon Cooper likened it to a pendulum. Fleeting when it’s in your favour, soon to return when it’s not. Essential to keep hold of when you get the chance. Essential, too, to understand it’ll come back around when it’s gone.
Momentum. That age-old engine of playoff glory.
“When it swings your way, you’ve got to keep it rolling as long as you can, because it can change in an instant,” the Tampa Bay Lightning coach had said, hours before his club waded into Game 2 of its first-round bout with the Toronto Maple Leafs, that pendulum having swung firmly in his direction two nights earlier. “You’ve got to try to keep it rolling as long as possible, because at some point it is going to change.”
Thursday night, under the Scotiabank Arena lights, it changed.
“You couldn’t ask for a better start,” head coach Sheldon Keefe said from the bowels of the arena Thursday night, after his team followed up its disastrous Game 1 with a clinical Game 2, a 7-3 loss answered with a 7-2 victory.
Rewind back to the beginning, to that opening puck-drop, and it isn’t difficult to spot the moment the ice began to tilt, the moment this game started rolling slowly in Toronto’s direction, instead of the other. The moment the pendulum started swinging back this way.
It took Mitch Marner just 35 seconds to set that imbalance in action. He did it the way he’s done it all season for this club, with a bit of courageous athleticism and an innate ability to map the patterns playing out around him on the ice. Thirty-five seconds into this night, when the tension was still hanging heavy in the air, the home crowd still a mess of hearts thumping against rib cages, No. 16 saw a sequence begin to unfurl.
He darted forward at the Lightning blue line, intercepting a seemingly harmless Bolts pass before it found its target. The quick thinking left him holding the puck inside Tampa’s zone, a red carpet rolled out between him and Andre Vasilevskiy, the danger of the setup forcing Tampa defender Ian Cole to haul the winger down.
“I was just trying to read eyes, read the play, see what’s open and see what I can pick off,” Marner said of that sterling first shift. “I wanted to make sure I did wait, just to see, in case they went behind me. I didn’t want to give up an odd-man rush or anything like that.
“I just trusted myself to make a play.”
Cut to the faceoff circle, the Maple Leafs gifted a power play inside the opening minute, as golden a chance as they could’ve asked for to set the tone, to start strong, to redeem themselves. The draw’s won, Ryan O’Reilly and Auston Matthews combining to get the puck back to Morgan Rielly. He whips it over to a waiting Marner.
After a Game 1 performance that saw the Maple Leafs seemingly overthink themselves into oblivion, the club burying themselves in nerves, in expectations, in line-matching chess games, this time Marner didn’t think. He just wound up, and let it fly.
A moment later, the goal horn was sounding, the crowd exploding, blue jerseys colliding in celebration.
“Mitch makes a great play, draws a penalty — we win the draw and just get a puck to the net right away,” Tavares said of the crucial early goal. “He shoots it through a defenceman, uses him as a screen. We wanted to get off to a good start considering the way things went for us the other night. It just brought a lot of life to the group, and we fed off it.”
Added his coach, on Marner’s early magic: “He takes charge of the game for us, right away.”
There’s no understating the importance of the moment. Not after the misery and doubt that washed over the city on the heels of the Maple Leafs’ clumsy series opener, and the thought of what would’ve happened had they come out in a similar fashion for a second straight game. Not after three years of these veteran, championship-calibre Bolts demonstrating their killer instinct, their ability to turn a snowball into an avalanche, and run away with the thing.
Toronto needed something exceptional to salvage their belief, even with hours of hockey still to play in this series. Thirty-five seconds in, when it still could’ve gone either way, their MVP gave them something.
“It was a nice job by our group tonight, coming out of the gates really well. The first goal — drawing a penalty early, executing, and getting on the board — it really got us going. It kept the life in the building,” Tavares said. “The fans were incredible tonight.”
It was only the start.
Just like the Lightning did in Game 1, the Leafs found an early thread and kept on pulling, trying to unwind their opponents before they could catch themselves.
Twelve minutes later, it was the captain who got the crowd roaring, Tavares winning an offensive-zone draw, beelining to the slot, spinning to receive a pass from a circling Rielly, and unloading a cannon past Vasilevskiy.
Even the usually-stoic Tavares couldn’t help but throw his arms in the air and send up an emphatic fist pump, swept up as his club exorcised the ghosts that crowded around them two nights ago.
“The emotion of the playoffs,” he said. “It was a hell of a play by Mo. And always great to capitalize, and extend our lead, and continue to build momentum off of a good start. Our building was jumping tonight, the fans were phenomenal. You get excited, and you want to feed off that emotion.”
It wasn’t just the goals, though.
In between those two tallies, the Maple Leafs seemed to do everything else they didn’t in Game 1, too. They threw bodies, played with composure in their own zone, kept their wits about them. When perennial Leaf killer Corey Perry started up his usual antics in Ilya Samsonov’s kitchen, the netminder’s teammates made their displeasure known, starting a dust-up that built to a scrum, veteran Mark Giordano dropping the gloves with Zach Bogosian, the crowd loving every minute of it.
And when the Bolts pushed back, baiting Toronto into a pair of penalties, sending out the lethal power play that ran rampant with four man-advantage goals in Game 1, the Leafs’ penalty kill simply handled its business, shutting them down with ease this time out.
By the end of the period, William Nylander had piled on, too, the 40-goal man collecting the puck with five minutes left in the opening 20, dragging it a touch to change the angle, and whipping in Toronto’s third goal of the night.
“Just our overall focus and execution I thought were really sharp tonight,” Keefe said. “In that first period, we scored a power-play goal, killed two penalties, scored a goal on a 6-on-5 situation, scored a goal off a faceoff. … From there, I thought we took care of the game well, and got better in the second period.”
Credit the man who held down the fort on the other side of the sheet, too, the coach said, praising Samsonov after a far steadier evening that surely quelled some hometown panic.
“You know, even though we score early, Tampa’s got some flurries there. They’re throwing some stuff at the net,” Keefe said. “I think the shots ended up 7-1 to start the game — there wasn’t a whole lot of quality to it, but he was busy nonetheless.
“He’s got to keep it out for us. And he did that.”
Give Cooper credit, too. While anxious fans throughout the city started writing off these Leafs in the wake of Game 1, the longest-tenured bench boss in the league didn’t buy it. He knew the counter-punch was coming, the pendulum peaking and getting ready to swing back the other way. He’s seen it before.
Now it’s Toronto’s turn to take that message to heart, and remember what comes next.
“I think what’s important for us is to understand that today is now over,” Keefe said after the final buzzer had sounded on a Game 2 win that only tilted more in his side’s favour as the night wore on, “It took us a little time to get over Game 1, but it was over by the time we had our meeting the next day. Now you’ve got to press on. It’s no different here now. Tampa’s going to be doing the same thing.
“They’re going to go back home, I’m sure they’re going to get some guys back in the lineup, and they’re going to play better. We’re going to have to play better. That’s just really it. That’ll be our focus here now.”
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