The game that we saw after Auston Matthews’s goal at the ACC Sunday night was the game that we expected all along.
It was exactly the game we expected when, on the last night of the season, the Maple Leafs drew Washington as their opponent in the opening round of the playoffs.
Not that we expected the Leafs to stretch the series to six games. Not that we expected every game in the series to be decided by
a single goal. Not that we expected the Leafs to be in the position they found themselves in, that being one goal up and just a few minutes away from forcing Game 7.
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We just expected that at some point the Capitals were going to be too big and too strong and too experienced for Toronto to keep up. Washington has earned a special sort of infamy for its playoff disappointments over the past decade and disappointments might await them ahead, but there were a lot of kids in central roles in the Toronto lineup and this entire spring has been terra incognita for them.
Matthews’s goal came completely against play about eight minutes into the third. Though the league officials counting the shots insisted that the Leafs had directed more pucks on Braden Holtby than Frederik Andersen had to face, it was the home team that had to do a lot more, as coach Mike Babcock would unfortunately say, puckering. All the best chances were Washington’s. But then a shoot-in by Morgan Rielly from the neutral zone took a crazy carom off, what, a stanchion, the porthole where ice-level lensman position their cameras, the seam on the boards for the gate in the corner, the rink-board ad featuring Mr. Peanut in his top hat and monocle or something else entirely.
The puck landed precisely on the tape of Matthews’s stick as he skated between Caps blue-liners Matt Niskanen and Dmitry Orlov and he put it past netminder Braden Holtby for his fourth goal of the series. It could easily have been a backbreaking turn of events for Washington. Instead it was a prompt and catalyst for the Capitals—over the duration of the game, as Babcock would later note, the Presidents’ Trophy winners played their best hockey of the series.
Thereafter the Leafs couldn’t generate a decent chance or sustain possession. The game achieved some sort of inevitability—Washington was down but couldn’t lose. It was just a matter of time and a question of whether the Capitals would manage to minute in three periods or need a little more.
It wasn’t exactly the most likely candidates who led the way for Washington over the last 12 minutes of regulation time and the six and a half minutes of overtime that proved necessary. This was almost certainly the only unexpected twist. You’d have expected it to be Alexander Ovechkin, one of the NHL’s 100 best ever according to the league’s centenary panelists. You’d have expected it to be Nicklas Backstrom, a centre over-shadowed by the scenery-eating Ovie and criminally underrated as a result.
Backstrom had his usual game, but Ovechkin had something less. You had to wonder if the Caps’ captain and lightning rod was still feeling the effects of the hip check that Nazem Kadri dropped on him in Game 5—it looked for the world like a pretty serious hyper-extension of his left knee. Ovechkin didn’t seem to have the same burst in his skating.
Kadri and his linemates Leo Komarov and Connor Brown did a good job on Ovechkin all night but it should be said he spent a lot of it stationary or in cruise.
Instead it was Marcus Johansson who scored the tying and overtime winning goal and he and his linemates Evgeny Kuznetsov and Justin Williams were consistently dangerous through three periods and part of a fourth. And you expected Williams, with his three Stanley Cup rings and a Conn Smythe Trophy, to have an impact in the series. Statisticians shrug off clutch so we’ll just have to suppose that Williams’s number came up when they were dealing out the primary assist on the goal that ended the series and put Washington into the second round against bêtes noires Pittsburgh.
It looked like some aspects of the Capitals’ game were exposed as soft spots over the course of six games. Like Williams, defenceman Brooks Orpik is lauded for his playoff experience and toughness but it looked at times like the 36-year-old perhaps had too many miles on him when vainly chasing the young, fleet Leafs forwards. And yet in the post mortem, you could point to Orpik levelling the blow that set up the victory in Game 6.
Orpik dropped the big hit, a clean one, on Roman Polak in Game 2 that ended the season of the Leafs’ lone, hard-rock defenceman. Although not the most aesthetically pleasing blue-liner, Polak was a valuable piece in Toronto’s run to the playoffs and it was his replacement Martin Marincin who would have struggled to sleep Sunday night after awful gaffes that led to Johansson’s goals. Even with Polak on hand, you expected that the Leafs’ defence was going to have issues, and without him it was going to push all the survivors to the limit—Matt Hunwick put in a pretty heroic team-leading 28-plus minutes Sunday night, but you could see all the miles skated by Jake Gardiner in the first five games were catching up to him in the sixth.
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In a battle of this season’s best versus last season’s worst, well, you have an idea how it’s going to look, and though it didn’t look that way through every minute of the first five games, it looked like that every shift after Auston Matthews’s goal. The Leafs’ management will now look at how to upgrade the blue-line and best position all the young talent, but the Capitals’ move on to face the defending Cup champions, with Ovie maybe not at his best versus Sid with Malkin tearing it up.
Maybe it’s not a better story than the upset would have been, but you have to believe that it will be better hockey and with high degree of likelihood of being the best series of the spring and the one from which the champion will emerge.
