Maple Leafs’ power play a work in progress amid ‘stagnant’ start to season

TORONTO — Three games into the Craig Berube Era in Toronto, there’s a different air around the Maple Leafs, a different energy permeating the locker room, and spilling into the hallways of Scotiabank Arena, too.

The arrival of the no-nonsense, ever-succinct bench boss has the blue and white playing a style of hockey just as direct, just as devoid of fluff, a philosophical rebranding that’s put two W’s on the board to this point. The Maple Leafs added the second of those Saturday night, under the lights against Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins, Berube’s squad weathering an early storm, and hints of a late one, before ultimately walking away with a 4-2 victory.

But while the club’s new leader has been pleased with the overall mindset shift among his new crew, and the results it’s brought through the early going, the coach sees gaps still in need of mending, question marks still in need of answers. Tops among them: the power play, which has yet to score through three tilts and nine opportunities in 2024-25.

“So far, it’s been stagnant,” Berube said from the bowels of the arena Saturday night, after the final buzzer had sounded. “We all know that. … I thought it got better in the third, got some opportunities. But we’ve got to get to work on it.”

It didn’t hurt them against the Penguins, the Maple Leafs finding three even-strength goals to secure a win against Crosby and Co. But after finishing the night with the same number of man-advantage tallies it had begun with, there is a quiet sense of unease around a power-play unit that’s often seen its all-world pieces not quite fall into place.

“You just want your power play to be clicking. Obviously, it hasn’t got off to the start we want it to,” Mitch Marner said from the locker room post-game on Saturday. “But we can’t get frustrated with it.”

“We’ve just got to simplify,” added fellow first-unit mainstay William Nylander. “But it’s early in the season. We’ll get clicking. We’re not worried about that.”

Three games into an 82-game trek, it would be a stretch to truly worry about the club’s man-advantage success — or to view it as a finished product, with assistant coach Marc Savard coming on board to revitalize the unit this season, and remaining in the early stages of that mission.

But it’s not the three-game run of goose eggs that prompts the Maple Leafs faithful to wonder about that progress this early in the campaign — it’s the lingering weight of what happened last May. After a string of post-season appearances that saw the club’s star-studded power play fall short time and time again, the unit found itself floundering against the Boston Bruins in Round 1, going 1-for-21 over the seven-game series, the second-lowest success rate among all playoff participants.

And then changes were made, a new approach was sought. Berube and Savard were brought in. Now, those inside and outside the locker room alike are waiting for the shift to take hold here too, in this particular area of pain.

“I thought we did a better job on our entries tonight,” Marner said of the club’s man-advantage efforts Saturday, where the Maple Leafs went 0-for-3. “In-zone play, we just need to be a little cleaner, more direct. We did have looks around the net, second opportunities that just didn’t fall our way. 

“We’ll get back to practice, talk about what we can get better at, figure it out, and just keep trying to get better with it.”

The Maple Leafs were flawless on the entry front, going seven-for-seven when it came to entering the zone clean against Pittsburgh, according to Sportlogiq. But it was what happened once they were across that blue line that seems to be the sticking point.

Rewind through the Saturday-night film, and you see a familiar pattern play out. In the second period, on the team’s first man-advantage chance, there was Marner, carrying the puck up ice with signature grace, crossing into the zone with ease, before a lost battle in the corner sent the puck skittering back out again. In the third, when the club found itself back on the power play for the second time, it was the same situation — an all-world cut into the zone, a battle lost in the corner, and the puck cleared; another clean entry, a battle lost behind the net, puck cleared.

The club found chances in and around those breakdowns, a point shot on that first run, some quality one-timer attempts on the second. But the trouble sustaining pressure robbed Toronto’s attack of momentum before it could fully grasp it.

Then came the Maple Leafs’ final power play of the night, and something different — this time, Marner flew into the zone with ease, and this time, the blue-and-white fought tooth and nail along the wall, won the battle, and kept possession. And then came a chance for Auston Matthews, another from the blue line, another for Matthew Knies.

Signs of progress.

“We have a lot of speed on this team. We’re trying to be predictable to each other, and when that happens, I think it’s working well for us,” Marner said of the club’s overall offensive approach. “We’ll just stick to it.”

Three games in, Berube’s already shown he’s open to a different approach from the previous regime, who rarely strayed from the club’s marquee names when it came to who hopped over the boards for PP1. After the top unit struggled the first time out Saturday, the bench boss didn’t hesitate to switch up the personnel for the rest of the game, replacing Morgan Rielly with Oliver Ekman-Larsson as the top unit’s quarterback, and sending young Knies out in place of veteran Max Pacioretty (himself a stand-in for John Tavares, who didn’t suit up Saturday). 

“Just moving some guys around tonight — just trying to find a spark, something different,” Berube said of the in-game changes, adding that the addition of Ekman-Larsson up top had an especially notable impact. “He’s run power plays for a long time. … He shoots the puck from the point. He establishes that shot. He’s pretty fluid walking the line, and seeing the ice.”

There’s no question the 33-year-old defender has experience on that front — since his big-league debut a decade-and-a-half ago, Ekman-Larsson’s logged the eighth-most power-play minutes of any defenceman in the league, nearly 3,000 in total. While Rielly’s long been the lead choice as the man on the point for Toronto’s top unit, the newcomer showed Saturday why he has something to offer, too.

Still, man-advantage woes aside, Berube’s new club heads into their fourth game of the season with a pair of wins, some positive progress, and a clear shift in their approach — enough to leave them feeling that the rest will come, in time.

“It maybe wasn’t our cleanest game, but I think we battled through it and played the systems pretty well,” said Nylander of the latest effort. “Just competed, won battles, and got the W.”