TORONTO — It seemed like a night in need of a marathon effort.
For two periods of this Tuesday night tilt under the Scotiabank Arena lights, the Toronto Maple Leafs looked out of step, out of sorts. The visiting Utah Mammoth had them on their heels — the hosts were down 2-1 after 40 minutes and netminder Sergei Bobrovsky was peppered to the tune of 30 shots, nearly double what the man on the other side of the sheet had weathered.
But slowly, steadily, the home side started to find their game, piecing together some promising sequences, pushing back against a Utah side that had wobbled them once already, three weeks ago in Salt Lake City.
By the midway point of the third period, the Maple Leafs had navigated a path back to even ground when Jack Roslovic netted his second of the night to pull his squad back into the fight. The ice was tilting. The crowd was buzzing.
Then it all went sideways.
With less than half a period left to play, Barrett Hayton drew Darren Raddysh into a back-and-forth to the right of the Maple Leafs' cage. The blue-liner tagged Hayton with a cross-check to the back, then another as the Utah forward turned to face him. Hayton then clamped down on Raddysh’s stick, and the pair of them fell to the ice. But the veteran defender dug in, raining another stiff cross-check down on the centreman as he lay on the ice.
A minute-and-a-half later, the puck was sitting in the Maple Leafs' net, the game-winner coming off Nick Schmaltz’s stick on the Mammoth's second power-play dagger of the tilt.
"Disappointing," head coach Jim Hiller said unprompted after the 3-2 loss, before a single question was asked by the reporters. "It took a long time for us to get going, no question. Bob kept us (in it). And then we take a stupid penalty, let’s call it what it is.
"It cost us. I thought we had all the momentum, and it didn’t turn out very well for us."
There was little that needed to be said to the 30-year-old vet, the coach said, with the result making the weight of the mistake clear enough.
"I think he knows, pretty clearly," Hiller said. "I haven’t seen that happen over and over again. That’s a one-off, I guess, in his case."
The road to that late-game turning point had been just as rocky, as the Maple Leafs came out of the gate stumbling against a Mammoth team that had already made clear they would be a stiff test.
"I think the first half of the game, we just didn't really have our legs or the energy needed to compete," Auston Matthews assessed. "That’s a team that transitions well, plays with a lot of speed and skill. I thought we got our game going in the second half a little bit. But, you know, it's right there for us.
"They get one on the power play and you're trying to tie it up with a couple minutes left. And we weren't able to."
The home loss comes in the wake of a lengthy western road trip that saw the Maple Leafs go 2-2 during a swing through Edmonton, Calgary, Seattle and Vancouver. The captain waved away the notion that the club was still feeling the effects of a busy start to the campaign.
"There's no excuses," Matthews said. "It doesn't matter — you know, the schedule, the travel, the time change and all that, you’ve got to come ready to play, regardless. You're not going to have your legs every single night, but you just try to find a way to compete and grind through. Unfortunately, it took half the game, but I thought we found it. We started competing, and found some life."
Then came the ill-timed penalty, and it was all for naught.
It wasn’t the first time Hayton wound up at the centre of some controversy on this night, though. Late in the second period, after the Maple Leafs had tied things up, the Utah centreman bulldozed his way through Toronto's net front, taking out Bobrovsky in the process, just as the Mammoth's Andrew Peeke wired in a shot from the point.
The officials convened to discuss the nuance of the sequence — Hayton appeared to clearly make contact with the Maple Leafs netminder and disrupt his ability to make a save, but the collision came outside of Bobrovsky's crease.
Ultimately, the play was ruled a good goal. Toronto didn’t challenge.
"What I hoped would have been an interference call by the referee. That’s what I was hoping," Hiller said of the team’s decision-making in the moment. "When that didn’t happen — Bobrovsky was in the white, and he got wiped right out, and you know, the rule, it’s tricky to interpret, it really is. We went through it, we’ve seen a lot of these, and we decided that because he was in the white, we weren’t going to challenge."
Key to the equation is the shaky success rate of this particular type of netfront collision, the coach said.
"Our video coaches, they’ve got a catalogue of all these different ones,” Hiller continued. “They know that one specifically, there’s been a lot of controversy about that one, where goalies have sometimes been (in the crease) and their body’s been out, they’ve been in the blue paint and their arms have been out. It’s a tough one. It’s a hard one for everybody."
In the end, the stumbles proved too many for the Maple Leafs to surmount. The result marks a third straight loss for the veteran Bobrovsky, who entered Tuesday’s affair coming off a disappointing performance against Seattle last week.
Despite another loss being added to the veteran’s ledger, the men who share a locker room with the two-time champion saw progress in this one.
"I thought he was great — I mean, they pounded pucks on our net for the first two periods, and he had to make some big saves," Matthews said of Bobrovsky post-game. "The goals that did go in were, you know, a lot of traffic, a little bit of what looked like interference.
"He competes each and every night. I don't think any guy in this locker room has any concern for him."
"He has a lot of self-confidence and self-belief, as he should — he’s one of the greatest goalies to ever play in the league," Hiller added. "He just carries on and does his business. So, I’m not surprised at all that he was out there giving us a chance tonight."
Still, there is no doubt chatter is beginning to bubble up among the Maple Leafs faithful concerning the club's goaltending situation, with backup Anthony Stolarz continuing to show well and Bobrovsky searching for a consistent stretch of quality with his new team.
Regardless, for the man himself, the focus will remain where it always is — on the next opportunity to prove his worth for his club.
"I try to focus on the next shot,” the 38-year-old said late Tuesday night. "I don’t think much about what happened in the past, or what’s going to happen in the future. Just one shot at a time, and try to give the best chance to my team to win the game."
