Upon Further Review: How a nervous start sunk the Leafs in Game 1

The Leafs played nervous hockey for the opening 10 minutes, and by then they’d almost lost their grip on Game 1. They hadn’t entirely let go, as we know – they worked it back to 3-2 when Toronto was seemingly in control of the play and energy early in the second – but with the stakes and pressure mounted high, they came out of the gates like a team trying not to make mistakes, which in this sport almost always leads to more of them.

That’s precisely what sent the snowball rolling down the negative side of the mountain: hesitancy had Toronto playing a game that wasn’t their own, and it gave Tampa every chance it needed.

Now, of course, the Leafs could’ve used a few saves, but we’ll get to that.

We’ll get to everything, I hope, but first I want to really dig in on…

The Leafs' Nervous Start

This Leafs core and its coach have always been a very particular type of team. They’ve got some elite talent and veteran guys who play poised, clever hockey, even if they’ve added other elements to that foundation.

Mitch Marner will slow the game down, wait and hang on to the puck until defences are blue in the face. William Nylander will cut back with the puck and hang on, too. Toronto's veteran D will make little slip passes underneath, often in front of their own net rather than forcing plays up the rink. Defensively, their forwards excel at staying above their checks, which allows their D to gap up tight in the neutral zone, often killing plays before they ever get started.

In the opening 10 minutes of play against the Lightning, the Leafs' style was unrecognizable, their preferred game nowhere to be seen.

It looked like a nervous team trying not to make the big mistake, asking the puck to do the work rather than their feet, choosing to dump it in rather than skate, backing off rather than gapping up tight. They were frozen, and with Tampa Bay predictably being in great spots defensively, it led to either icings or handing the puck back to the opposition. 

Right out of the gates here, the Leafs have the puck, Tampa’s in good position, and rather than swing it back for a D hinge, Mark Giordano tries to force one up the ice.

Icing, back in their own zone.

When they tried to break it out after the icing, there’s another play Gio can make to help them keep possession and attack, but he again forces it into coverage.

Instead of skating forwards or making a play like this:

He does this:

It’s not an outright bad play early in the game, it just spoke to how the Leafs started off trying to be excessively safe. They wanted to move the puck forwards rather than build something meaningful with it.

Then the Lightning scored early and it’s the same theme on that sequence, where Zach Aston-Reese doesn’t make a confident play – he has the option to just skate with the puck by taking the room afforded him by Ian Cole:

But it turns into a panic “here you take it” play. He’s gotta hit the brakes and start skating up his own lane, rather than drifting into the middle with this:

I’m not keying on that because it’s a goal against, but because it was an obvious theme.

The Leafs had “here you take it”-itis, which revealed their nervousness. Here, you take it.

Watching the first 10 minutes of Game 1 and waiting for the Leafs to play like themselves was jarring. Here TJ Brodie has a net-front slip option to relieve pressure and allow the Leafs to attack the other way. They make this play all the time.

But instead it’s forced into coverage, and they concede the puck as its heads down the ice again.

When it comes back to Toronto's end, Giordano has room to skate the puck up-ice a bit on a breakout – which would at least buy the forwards time to get open - but instead he doesn’t move his feet, forces one into traffic (excellent defending here), and it’s another punt back to the Bolts.

And that clip comes just mere moments before something we rarely see from Marner in the regular season. He’s not moving his feet, instead choosing to flip-punt the puck back to the opposition (and then change, leaving his teammate in a tough spot). This was one of three Marner flips in the opening 10 minutes, and it leads to Tampa Bay’s rush against and eventual second goal.

Marner so rarely stops as he does at the top of this GIF.

I’ll spare you clipping every second of the game, but there’s a Luke Schenn retrieval where he fails to make a D-to-D pass, there’s a Jake McCabe retrieval where he lacks touch and ices the puck -- there just seemed to be a lot of stick-squeezing and little composed playmaking.

Another element where that sort of thing shows up is in not wanting to get beat clean – you don’t want to be the guy who makes the obvious mistake with all this pressure, right? For the D, that means you don’t want someone to blow your doors off wide, and with the pace and energy in the building, it probably feels like it can happen at any given moment. And so, the defence sagged off rather than moving their feet up the rink to keep tight gaps, leaving Tampa Bay to enjoy oceans of room on their entries in the first 10 minutes.

The entry defence on this Mikey Eyssimont rush is particularly egregious.

I mean, good lord.

But even simple plays, like this early skate-in where they were just unchallenged:

It was easy access to the zone for Tampa.

There’s one where Giordano was turning his skates so early to skate forward with an attacker who wasn’t even trying to beat him wide (one rush prior to when the second goal is scored) that I could barely make sense of it:

Giordano’s been awesome for them, but it was a tough 10 minutes.

When gaps are tight, the attacking team has to dump it in and chase it down, often fruitlessly. When you play a team that’s so good with the puck like Toronto can be, that’s your sole goal defending them off the rush – be so tight that they’ve got no choice but to hand it back over.

When’s the last time the Leafs looked like this through the middle of the ice?

So we can pick through the Leafs' performance, and talk about lines and matchups and strategies and all that, but when a team plays that nervous for 10 minutes it’s almost impossible to draw much in the way of series-long conclusions.

Once they settled in during the second period, the Leafs controlled a nice run of play before penalties got the better of them, and the game slipped through their fingers.

So now let’s touch on the other big picture topics, and what comes next.

The Goaltending

I don’t know if you’d call this a good thing or a bad thing, but Ilya Samsonov played his worst game as a Maple Leaf in Game 1. The concern is that this is a small but growing trend over his young NHL career. The hope, however, is that since his playoff sample size isn’t even 10 games yet, and he is fundamentally a good goaltender, better play is coming.

The problem seemed to be that Samsonov thought nets in playoffs grew to the size of those in soccer, and he was aggressively pushing on every puck like it was a lunge. Even on shots that never got through to the net he pushed himself out of the crease towards the corner. The Bellemare goal to open things up gets smacked into the middle of the net and Samsonov isn't there because he’s so energetic and active in pursuit of the puck.

Goalies shouldn’t pursue pucks. Those pieces of frozen rubber, in theory, have to come through them. It’s a crease composure issue, and hopefully one that’s easily correctable for Samsonov.

He’ll play in Game 2 (as Joseph Woll has all of a dozen NHL games experience) and what else can you say there aside from “Samsonov needs to be better?” He said the same of himself.

The refereeing

Leafs fans are up in arms about the way the calls went in Game 1, and in fairness, the whistle was highly uncharitable. Some have gone so far as to tie it to Wes MacAuley himself, and his history with Sheldon Keefe:

More than anything, though, is that I think it’s tied to this chart, which was in this Cam Charron article, on when refs actually call penalties (compared to average) in the playoffs.

They absolutely try to “set the tone” early in series (and early in the playoffs in general), and so they make more soft calls:

The stripes weren’t great, particularly with the timing of the softer calls on Luke Schenn and David Kampf with the score 3-2, but they weren’t the main issue.

Nervousness and Ilya Samsonov headlined my list.

From there, a weak penalty kill hurt the Leafs (where they need more up-ice pressure on Tampa’s breakouts), a goal that may or may not have gone in hurt, and goals in the final three seconds of the first and second periods … it all added up to a pretty rough opening game.

Michael Bunting

Bunting has lost the benefit of the doubt, and his hit on Erik Cernak was egregious. It was cheap, a head shot, and out of the context of usual play, so he will be suspended. Matthew Knies will very likely draw in on the third line with Calle Jarnkrok on the top line.

The only thing worth watching now is, where do the Leafs use Bunting when he does come back?

Where things sit now

The strangest thing about it all is, you can paint a bright picture of a new day for the Leafs. Tampa Bay lost Victor Hedman to injury, as well as Cernak, and Eyssimont left after the huge hit from McCabe. At 5-on-5 when the game was still up for grabs and after Hedman had left, the Leafs started to have their way of things before the penalties derailed that momentum. You can see a world where they control the 5-on-5 play if Hedman and/or Cernak aren’t back in Tampa's lineup.

Toronto is solidly 13 forwards deep, so losing Bunting for one or two games won’t be a crisis. Samsonov has way more to give, and the nervousness of Game 1 should have come and gone. It’s an uphill climb, but for a team down 1-0 in their series after losing by four goals, you have to feel OK about the Leafs' chances in Game 2.

The ghosts of old reared their ugly head for a night, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if the Leafs aren’t better prepared to beat both the Lightning and those old demons, the first-round punchlines are going to take on a life all their own.