Leafs needed to win Tuesday against Jets: Brophy
Posted February 8, 2012 11:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
If you want to make the playoffs, there are certain games you just have to win — no matter what.
Tuesday night in Winnipeg was one of those for the Maple Leafs. It wasn’t a bad game for the Leafs, not by a long shot, but it was not the result they were hoping for as they took a 1-0 lead and lost 2-1 to the Jets. The Leafs blew an opportunity to put 10 points between themselves and their hosts, who are one of their main competitors for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
Some would suggest the deck was stacked against the Leafs.
Sure it was a game on back-to-back nights. And they had to travel. And it was their third game in four nights — two of which were on the road. And the Jets are a much better team at home than they are on the road.
Blah, Blah, Blah…
Isn’t winning in a situation like that what separates the men from the boys — the playoff teams from the non-playoff teams?
Excuses are for losers and Leafs coach Ron Wilson certainly wasn’t having any of it in his brief post-game press conference. A clearly irritated Wilson said he expected more out of his players, who were outshot 29-18 in the game and 12-5 in the third period when they trailed by a goal.
“We didn’t direct enough pucks to the net,” Wilson said. “We were trying to make an extra play … an extra pass, and things like that.”
Given the fact it was his team’s third game in four nights — and it’s not like the Leafs are the only team in the NHL to have a tough schedule — Wilson said the strategy was to get pucks to the net. That doesn’t sound so difficult, huh?
“We were skating so well I don’t think our guys felt the need to do that,” he said. “That should have been what we were doing — especially in the third period — but we still didn’t get enough pucks to the front of the net.”
What probably stings the most for the Leafs is it wasn’t a horrible overall performance, but the fact they were so close and yet failed to get even a single point is what will haunt them in the end. You tend to look back on loses like the one in Winnipeg Tuesday night, or a similar loss in the same city New Year’s Eve (3-2) as well as the 4-3 OT loss to the Carolina Hurricanes two nights before that, as games that should have been victories.
Phil Kessel gave the Maple Leafs a 1-0 lead at 11:06 of the first period, marking the third consecutive season the sharp-shooter has hit the 30-goal plateau. It was his fourth goal in the past three games as he continues to suggest he has snapped out of a goal-scoring funk that saw him score just twice in the previous 10 games. As further evidence of what the coach said, however, it was Kessel’s only shot on goal in the game. Tim Connolly (three) and Mikhail Grabovski (two) were the only Leafs to manage more than one shot on goal.
Little mistakes proved costly for the Leafs. On the first Jets goal Chris Thorburn — he of just two goals his season — looked like Rocket Richard driving hard into the Leafs zone on his off wing and the right-shooting winger took a sharp backhander from a bad angle that somehow found the far side of the goal. Quite simply, if Leafs goalie Jonas Gustavsson had played his angle properly, there is no way that puck gets in.
On the winning goal Leafs defenceman Cody Franson, who has been a positive force on the blueline for the past eight weeks, was simply out-muscled by Winnipeg’s Blake Wheeler driving to the net. Wheeler showed great determination, but he’ll never be mistaken for one of the top power forwards in the league. Gustavsson made the original save, but Bryan Little was there to snap home the rebound.
Game over.
Joffrey Lupul, who sits second in club scoring and sixth in the league agreed with the coach.
“We could have shot a couple of more times,” Lupul said. “We tried to make some cute plays by the net that were really close to going in — actually a lot of them — but their team did a really good job coming back to the net. Again, there were a couple of opportunities we probably would have liked to have shot the puck in hindsight.”
And fellow winger Joey Crabb was not buying into the fatigue theory.
“I think we had pretty good legs, actually,” Crabb said. “Two in two isn’t so bad and we’re in pretty good shape right now. We just didn’t put pucks to the net like we wanted. We had good puck possession time, but we didn’t have many shots to show for it. I think we were looking for the pretty play too much. We had lots of chances to shoot and we were trying to make the back-door tap-ins and we have to get back to putting the puck on the net.”
The Leafs travel to Philadelphia Wednesday for a Thursday night game against the Flyers and then host the Montreal Canadiens at the ACC Saturday night.
