TORONTO — Twenty-four hours after delivering a familiar dose of heartbreak to their fans back home to kick off the new season, Auston Matthews and his Toronto Maple Leafs returned to Scotiabank Arena Thursday night and got the MVP chants raining down once again.
It wasn’t the game-winning goal No. 34 tipped home that prompted the three-letter echo, though. It was the reigning Hart Trophy winner throwing the body, delivering a stiff check — not for the first time on this night — that had the Leafs faithful serenading him.
A bit of appreciation for a hard-nosed performance in a hard-fought game.
“Definitely the effort we wanted tonight,” Matthews said of the eventual 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals, after the final buzzer had sounded. “Just a nice bounce-back game after last night. I thought we played really hard. They played really hard in their end as well. It wasn’t an easy game, but obviously, it took a full 60-minute effort there from everybody.”
One night ago, of course, the Maple Leafs dropped a season-opening tilt on the road in Montreal that saw far too many tried-and-true bad habits creep into their game. While some on the other side of the glass waved it away as only the first of 82 tries at getting it right, those in the room understood the need to right the ship as quickly as possible.
“Not too happy, obviously, with the result [on Wednesday],” Matthews said of the 4-3 loss. “Obviously it’s one game, but you always want to start off well and implement stuff that we’ve been working on throughout training camp. So, this was a good bounce-back win for us — we wanted to come out and obviously have a better effort than we did the night before.”
It was Matthews’ first goal of 2022-23 that ensured that better effort didn’t go to waste.
After two periods of quality looks that came off his stick and fell just a few centimetres off target, after attempts at setting up teammates wound up going awry, too — a broken twig dispensing with a chance Matthews delivered to Mark Giordano, a fanned attempt on an open net putting an end to one given to Michael Bunting — Toronto’s 60-goal man leaned on his sniper’s versatility to put this one away.
Posting up in the slot as the puck made its way to Giordano at the left point seven minutes into the third period, the game knotted at 2-2, Matthews spun as the veteran fired, sliced at the puck as it flew past him, and altered its course just enough for it to wobble in mid-air and trickle over the shoulder of Capitals netminder Charlie Lindgren.
“I didn’t know, honestly,” Matthews said when asked if he felt his blade graze the puck after it left Giordano’s stick. “It just happened.”
The Maple Leafs will take it, surely, after coming nerve-rackingly close to starting their season with back-to-back nights of comeback efforts falling through their hands.
“I liked how our guys stuck with it,” head coach Sheldon Keefe said after his club earned its first win of the campaign. “We got the goal we needed in the third period and did a good job after that. Even with the penalty kills late, we did a really good job.”
While it’s taken time for the Maple Leafs to get their engines firing on all cylinders, the man leading the blue and white forward, the one bearing the responsibility of the "C" stitched to his sweater, has needed no extra push.
After a two-point performance in Toronto’s disappointing opener Wednesday, John Tavares was front and centre to pull his club forward in the redemption effort Thursday night. After potting the opening goal six-and-a-half minutes into the opening frame, he spent the next two periods dominating the faceoff circle (finishing with a sterling 71 per cent) and feeding linemate William Nylander chance after chance on Lindgren.
“We talked about being more patient with our game,” the captain said of how his squad adjusted its approach against the Capitals. “I think we tried to do a little too much yesterday, caught us chasing a little bit. So, just sticking with it. Obviously, it was more of a physical night compared to yesterday, it was a hard-fought game.
“We just stuck with our game, and eventually ... we broke through and got some big plays when we needed them.”
Like his star scorer, like his captain, Keefe was well-aware of just how needed those plays were, just how important a win Thursday was after what happened a night earlier, even with 98 per cent of the season yet to be played.
“I do think it’s really important,” the coach said. “We have expectations as a team, not just to get the results that we want to get as we go through this journey, but just how we conduct ourselves and how we perform. The first game of the season, it was a good opportunity for us to build positive momentum and get rolling, and we didn’t get that done.
“So, it was important for us to really talk about that and be honest about it, not just brush it aside as just another game or just one game. We had a frank discussion this morning, and I thought the guys responded really well.”
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