Brophy on MacArthur: Rise to the challenge
Posted February 2, 2012 12:36 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Clarke MacArthur is happy to be home again. Home again, that is, playing on the second line with his old pals Mikhail Grabovski and Nikolai Kulemin.
It wasn’t long ago, just a little over week in fact, that the 26-year-old left winger from Lloydminster, Alta., found himself demoted to the fourth line. And yet on Wednesday night it was MacArthur, back on the second line, who scored the only goal of the game in a 1-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins at the Air Canada Centre.
One night after the Maple Leafs uncharacteristically blew a 4-1 lead, losing 5-4 to the Penguins in a shootout in Pittsburgh, they emerged successfully in an otherwise boring 60 minutes of hockey to keep their playoff hopes alive.
MacArthur’s 16th goal of the season – and fourth in the past three games – was all the Leafs needed, as things turned out.
It has been a bit of a weird season for the veteran winger who has bounced around between lines as the Leafs try to find four steady units that will lead them to the promised land, and when he found himself on the fourth line he was neither surprised, nor was he distressed. Considering he’s coming off a career year in which he scored 21 goals and 62 points, that’s a bit surprising. He said he completely bought into what coach Ron Wilson was trying to do, replacing him with Joey Crabb.
“Wilson wanted to see more out of me,” MacArthur said. “He wanted to see me skating more. I’m more effective when I’m finishing hits and I’m working my way back to that. He knows a lot. He’s been around for a ton of games so it’s one of those things where it’s good to hear it from a guy like that.”
Wilson said he was up front with MacArthur and told him the demotion was a temporary move, as long as he got back to doing the things that made him such a success last season.
“I thought Joey Crabb was adding something and I told Clarke that our fourth line plays at least 10-12 minutes a night so it was a chance to clear his mind, get his feet moving and get involved in the forecheck and then bring that back over to the Grabovski line,” Wilson said. “I told him as soon as I saw him moving his feet he’d get bumped back up. It was four and a half periods and, yeah, it was a bit of a wake-up call and he has responded very well. I told him not to view it the wrong way. It’s not like I was putting him on a line that was only going to get five shifts a night. I wanted to get Clarke winning battles on the boards, but more than anything moving his feet and becoming a part of the forecheck which he had gotten away from.”
Wilson also chose Grabovski, Kulemin and MacArthur to check Pittsburgh’s top scoring line of Evgeni Malkin, James Neal and Chris Kunitz. So, not only did the Toronto trio shut down the Pens most potent scoring threats, they produced the only goal of the game that has them now sitting in seventh place in the Eastern Conference.
MacArthur loves the challenge of trying to keep the opposition’s best players off the score sheet.
“For me, it’s fun when an offensive line like that comes in, to ruin their night,” MacArthur said. “We try to frustrate them and skate hard and backcheck them. We didn’t give them a whole lot so those are great games to play. Usually when you play against offensive lines and you work hard you’re going to get scoring opportunities. We had three or four really good chances and it was nice to get one and get the win.”
Playing against Malkin, who just happens to lead the NHL in scoring with 27 goals and 59 points in 44 games, is a challenge to say the least. Part of the strategy is to hit Malkin as hard and as often as possible. MacArthur nailed Malkin once in the first period and it was obvious the Penguins star did not appreciate it. MacArthur did.
“If anything, it’s just to stop him and make him have to get going again because he’s such a dominant player. You have to get your hits in on him when you can to slow him up. Even still, he came out of the corner hard a few times. He’s like a bull. You have to give him credit.”
The Leafs’ next game is Saturday in Ottawa. Would he like the opportunity to try to shut down Jason Spezza, one of the NHL’s top scorers this season?
“I hope so,” he said. “We did most of the checking last year as far as trying to shut down the other team’s top lines and we did well with that. It’s nice in the second half when you get into matching lines and it feels good to get out there trying to shut a line down.”
For the Leafs, the victory was a confidence builder. Not only did James Reimer get a shutout in his return to the crease – although, truth be told, it wasn’t his best outing of the year – the Leafs proved they could bounce back from adversity. Blowing a three-goal lead the night before could have been devastating.
“I thought it was a harder-fought game tonight,” MacArthur said. “It felt like a playoff game. I thought we locked it down and made smart plays. In the third period we kept our foot on the gas the whole time and there was really no momentum shift. To get three out of four (points) against a team that was rolling is huge.”
