Maple Leafs’ Loss to the Senators Raises 5 Thoughts

The Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Ottawa Senators 3-2 on home ice, but this wasn’t one of those games where the whole night felt wrong. In fact, the first two periods might have been Toronto’s best hockey of the young season.

The interesting question is whether that was because the Maple Leafs were playing particularly well or because Ottawa was playing its first game of the season. Either way, Toronto controlled the game for long stretches. Then came the third period, and suddenly everything changed.

Two Periods of Almost Complete Maple Leafs Control

The numbers tell the story pretty clearly. At five-on-five, the Maple Leafs controlled 72 percent of the scoring chances in the first period and an astonishing 81 percent in the second, according to Natural Stat Trick. Then came the third period: nine percent.

That’s not a gradual shift. That’s a game turning on its head. The Maple Leafs actually had a terrific opportunity to put the game away early in the third. The power play was dominant, and Toronto hit the iron three—or maybe four—times without scoring. After that, the Senators took over. Whatever Toronto had been doing for 40 minutes disappeared.

That’s probably the biggest lesson from this game. The Maple Leafs don’t need to panic about the first 40 minutes. They need to figure out how a game they controlled so thoroughly suddenly became a game they couldn’t control at all.

Cowan Keeps Making His Case for a Bigger Role

Easton Cowan remains one of the more interesting players to watch. His underlying numbers were excellent again. Cowan finished with an 83 percent share of scoring chances and an 80.4 percent expected-goals share. Those aren’t just good numbers. They’re the kind of numbers that show up often enough to become hard to dismiss.

There is an interesting distinction to make with Cowan, too. He doesn’t necessarily have to be the player who drives a line. He might be an excellent complementary player, much like Matthew Knies was. He seems to make the players around him better while still finding ways to influence the game. That could be an important role for this team.

The Fourth Line Was a Different Story

While Cowan was driving play, Toronto’s fourth line was getting driven right back into its own end. Teddy Blueger and Brandon Duhaime finished with just 17 percent of the scoring chances and 14 percent of the expected goals at five-on-five. Bo Groulx was better when he wasn’t playing with those two, finishing at 50 percent in scoring chances and 32 percent in expected goals.

That makes Groulx an interesting little story. Of all the players from the Toronto Marlies’ Calder Cup-winning roster, he probably wasn’t the name most people expected to make the Maple Leafs. Yet through the first few games, he’s arguably been Toronto’s best fourth-line player. Sometimes these things aren’t complicated. A player gets an opportunity and makes something of it.

Hiller’s Defensive Deployment Is Worth Watching

One of the more curious things about the game was head coach Jim Hiller’s distribution of minutes among his defensemen. Darren Raddysh led the group at 22:46, followed by Morgan Rielly at 18:23, Troy Stecher at 18:10, Jake McCabe at 17:45, Chris Tanev at 17:28 and Oliver Ekman-Larsson at 17:08.

The odd part is that Raddysh had an excellent underlying game, with his numbers sitting in the 70-to-80 percent range. That helps explain his ice time. But Stecher was the only defenseman with negative underlying numbers, yet he played more than McCabe and Tanev. There may be reasons that aren’t visible in the numbers, and Hiller may be managing Tanev’s workload carefully. But McCabe being below 18 minutes while Stecher was over 18 is something worth watching.

The first few games are often when coaches experiment with roles. Hiller’s defensive deployment may tell us something about where he sees these players fitting as the season develops.

McKenna Is Still Finding His Feet

Gavin McKenna showed flashes, but he still doesn’t quite look relaxed. That’s understandable because he’s a young player trying to find his place in an NHL lineup, and now he’s getting shifts with John Tavares and William Nylander. At times, his skill was obvious, but the game still seemed to move a little faster than he wanted.

There may be another possibility here. McKenna could eventually be the kind of player who drives the third line rather than trying to squeeze himself into somebody else’s top-six role. Speaking of Nylander, he was probably the best Maple Leaf on the ice visually. The underlying numbers can tell us plenty, but sometimes the eyes still have something to say.

There Is One Thing the Leafs Have to Fix

Toronto has scored two goals in each of its first three games. That’s six goals in three games. Maybe no one should panic. This team has too much offensive talent to believe it will keep scoring at that rate. Auston Matthews, Nylander, Tavares, Marchenko and the rest of the forward group are going to score more.

But the Maple Leafs also can’t assume the goals will simply arrive because the talent is there. Against Ottawa, they had enough control through two periods to create the kind of game they wanted. They just didn’t finish it. The third-period power play produced chances but no goal, and once Ottawa took control, Toronto couldn’t get it back.

So maybe the most useful way to look at this loss isn’t that the Maple Leafs played badly. They didn’t. It’s that they played well enough for two periods to win. Then they couldn’t find a way to play that same game for another 20 minutes.

[Note: I want to thank long-time Maple Leafs fan Stan Smith for collaborating with me on this post.]