Jilted defencemen hate it. Risk-averse coaches fear its potential downside. But a power play manned by five forwards looked like an awfully explosive weapon for the Maple Leafs on Sunday night.
It wasn’t simply that pc28went 3-for-6 with the man advantage in a 6-2 Game 1 win over the Senators, more than quelling fears of a repeat of last year’s 1-for-21 performance in a seven-game series loss to the Bruins.
It was how pc28scored its power-play goals. If its three successful power plays had one thing in common, it was urgency.
The Leafs scored nine seconds into their first power-play opportunity, John Tavares banging in the rebound of a William Nylander wrister.
They scored three seconds into their third, Nylander walking into an empty slot with a 5-on-3 manpower edge and burying a crafty sweeper over Linus Ullmark’s blocker.
And even when pc28had built a 5-2 lead in the third period, pc28coach Craig Berube didn’t succumb to the urge to be more conservative and send out a defenceman with Toronto’s top power-play unit. Berube stuck with the five-forward configuration, just as he has for most of the back half of the season — this in stark contrast to predecessor Sheldon Keefe, whose experiments with five-forward schemes rarely lasted long.
On Sunday Toronto’s all-forwards power-play unit, to its credit, didn’t veer from the game plan, even with the luxury of that 5-2 lead. Tavares won a faceoff. Point man Mitch Marner filtered a shot through a crowd. Auston Matthews tried to bang in that rebound. And Matthew Knies collected Matthews’s rebound in the goal mouth and slapped one in from close range.
For Berube, who came to pc28preaching a straightforward style that prioritized north-south directness over east-west dilly-dallying, it was a tailor-made post-season opener. If the Leafs, at their least effective, have occasionally been guilty of overpassing their way through power plays while posing minimal net-front threat, Sunday showed a team that understood the assignment.
“The power play did a good job of just getting it to the net right away … We’ve just got to keep doing the same thing,” Berube said. “We’re looking to attack right away. That’s a good mentality, in my opinion. Playoffs, pucks to the net, pucks to the net. That’s what you’ve got to think about.”
“Pucks to the net” hasn’t always been the theme of Maple Leafs power plays in the playoffs. Last year, when pc28scored just once in 21 power-play opportunities in a seven-game first-round loss to the Bruins, the Leafs only managed to place 35 shots on goal with the man advantage in the series — an average of five power-play shots on goal a game. Sunday night alone their six power plays yielded 11 shots on goal, which spoke to the unit-wide focus on the game plan.
Certainly the Game 1 dominance underlined a point of emphasis for the Senators, who
“Obviously if you give them so many power plays, their skill will take over,” Tim Stützle, the Senators forward, told reporters in Ottawa. “They have a lot of good players who can make plays … We’ve just got to stay out of the box.”
It was one game, for sure. And it’s worth remembering that coming into the series it was the Maple Leafs flagging the danger of allowing the Senators to draw a favourable whistle. Ottawa led the NHL in power-play opportunities and power-play goals during the regular season; the Leafs ranked 20th in power-play chances and 11th in power-play goals. Stützle co-led the league with former Leaf Nazem Kadri in drawing penalties, with Senators captain Brady Tkachuk ranking fourth. The top Leaf in the category, Pontus Holmberg, ranked 17th.
To say Sunday was an outlier is probably fair. In 82 regular-season games, the Leafs .
“You can’t get complacent. It’s one game. Obviously we’re happy with the result. But we know we have to be better,” Matthews said. “There’s no sitting back for us.”
If there’s no sitting back, in Game 1 there was very little settling for power-play passes around the perimeter — an appealing development for a team that has made a habit of such in previous post-seasons. Instead, there were five forwards with what seemed to be one common goal — to put the puck in the net as promptly as possible. It’ll be a performance that’s difficult to repeat; pc28was a combined 0-for-10 on the power play in the final four games of the regular season, which speaks to the hot-and-cold nature of special teams. But if nothing else, Sunday set a standard — what the Leafs’ power play can be when it’s at its best.
“I think special teams are going to be a very important part of playoffs. I feel like the people that win at the end of the year are usually the ones with the best special teams,” Knies said. “It’s a good start, but we’ve got to keep it going. It’s just one game. We’ve got to kind of forget about that one and keep moving forward.”
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