TORONTO — Just one night into their tenure in Toronto, Ilya Lyubushkin and Ryan Dzingel have already managed to step up with their first clutch performance for their new club, the pair’s acquisition from the Arizona Coyotes late Saturday providing a welcome distraction from the lacklustre effort put in by the Maple Leafs earlier in the evening.
Through 40 minutes of the tilt, it still looked salvageable, Toronto having battled back to an even score in front of the 9,098 who’d flocked to the Scotiabank Arena to see a follow-up to Thursday’s thriller. Instead, it was the St. Louis Blues flying up and down the sheet Saturday night, overwhelming the Maple Leafs and, in those final 20 minutes, taking the close game, balling it up, and chucking it easily into their own win column with a trio of third-period goals.
Amid the wreckage of that 6-3 loss, though, there was some worthwhile progress recovered for the Maple Leafs, in the form of some fine performances from the depths of the club’s forward lineup.
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While it was Auston Matthews, Michael Bunting and Mitch Marner who combined for the key damage at even-strength last game, it was William Nylander and Alex Kerfoot who shouldered the bulk of the offensive danger on Saturday. Centred by captain John Tavares, the two wingers were buzzing all night, at times seeming the only combination of blue sweaters who could create quality looks with some regularity.
It was that chipping away that kept the Maple Leafs from being all but buried after going down 2-0 just 12 minutes in. By the middle of the second frame, Nylander had instead buried his 18th and 19th goals of the year to get Toronto back to level ground. In racking up primary helpers on both goals, Kerfoot continued to climb the ranks of the best 5-on-5 playmakers of the 2021-22 season, his 22 even-strength assists ranking sixth-most in the league after Saturday night.
That it was Nylander’s line that wound up as one of the only bright spots on the night wasn’t necessarily a surprise to the trio’s coach, though.
“I had said [that line] had been generating chances, and it just seemed like it was a matter of time — particularly with Will,” head coach Sheldon Keefe said of Nylander after the game. “Those shots that he’s had, where he’s in behind the D and he’s all alone with the goalie, he’s had those for a while now and they haven’t gone in for him. … Tonight they did, so that’s a really good sign for him and us.”
The smooth-skating Swede echoed the sentiment.
“I think it started a little bit in Seattle, I think we got something going,” he said. “And I thought last game we had a lot of chances. … We’ve been creating more and more every game.”
Though they didn’t enjoy the same scoreboard glamour, the third-line unit of Ilya Mikheyev, David Kampf and Ondrej Kase made their presence known just as well, clawing all night to try to pull the Maple Leafs back.
Both in the early going, when much of the rest of the lineup struggled to string together quality chances, and late in the night, with the game slipping away, there were multiple moments that saw Mikheyev and Co. fighting for an extended stay in the Blues’ zone, manufacturing some quality looks by way of sheer determination and quiet poise.
Had things fallen differently, it could’ve ended up a crucial facet of Toronto’s effort, as it was the dutiful battling from those third-line soldiers — grinding down low behind the Blues’ net — that eventually led to T.J. Brodie’s goal late in the second period, the one that got the team back to 3-3 heading into the final frame, the game still alive.
Ultimately, the issues on the other side of the puck that dogged the Maple Leafs from the opening minutes caught up with them, nullifying all of it.
“We didn’t defend well enough tonight to give ourselves a chance to win,” Keefe said of the loss, which snaps the team’s brief win streak at two games. “They have a lot of skill — they’re one of the top teams in the NHL on the rush. We knew that going into the game, that it was going to be a challenge for us to defend against that. And they got the better of us, we didn’t do a good enough job with it.”
The Blues moved up to second in the Central with Saturday night’s win (Toronto sticking at third in the Atlantic). But the blueprint that’s guiding St. Louis back to the playoffs this time around is a long way from the one that netted them the Cup just a few years back.
“They’ve developed a reputation as a big, heavy team, but they’ve completely transformed how they play this year,” Keefe said of those Blues. “They’re as dangerous as any team there is in the NHL on the rush, and they showed that tonight.”
On the receiving end of relentless speed was Jack Campbell, dealt a rough follow-up to his gem against Pittsburgh on Thursday, which had Keefe saying No. 36 was looking as calm as he’d ever seen him.
The Maple Leafs netminder had five goals hung on him this time around, turning aside 28 of the Blues’ 33 shots.
Even so, his coach isn’t chalking that reversal up to inconsistency, given what he saw from the rest of the group.
“He [didn’t] have a chance to be good tonight,” Keefe said of his goaltender. “When you give up five it doesn’t look good, but there were just a lot of gifts tonight. In around the net, tap-ins.
“Our team didn’t do a good enough job for him tonight.”
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