'You Can't Spot A Team Three (Goals) And Expect To Win The Game': Maple Leafs' Sheldon Keefe Has No Time For Moral Victories

VANCOUVER — In many ways, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ ability to turn it on when the going gets tough is commendable. But how the adversity sets in in the first place seems to be a recurring theme for the club.

The Maple Leafs fell into a 3-0 deficit against the Vancouver Canucks after one period of play. It took just 8:19 of the second period to tie things up 3-3.

They had all of the momentum as Canucks coach Rick Tocchet was forced to call a timeout to settle down his club. But in the third period, the Canucks were able to pull away with a couple of power-play goals to win the game 6-4.

What can the Maple Leafs take away from a regulation loss against the best team in the NHL?

“Zero points,” Keefe said abruptly.

The Maple Leafs went into Saturday’s game breathing a heavy sigh of relief after holding on to defeat the Calgary Flames 4-3 to snap a four-game losing streak.

This wasn’t the momentum builder they had hoped it would be.

In the opening 20 minutes, the Maple Leafs were swarmed by the Canucks. When they weren’t scoring goals, they were delivering hard hits, like the one Tyler Myers leveled on Calle Jarnkrok, depositing the Maple Leafs forward into the opposing team’s bench.

But the tone was set by the Canucks on the opening goal of the game. There were several chances by the Maple to clear the puck out of their zone in the opening couple of minutes when Max Domi and Timothy Liljegren failed to clear it out.

When that failed, Martin Jones had a chance to freeze the puck and kill the play, but Nils Hoglander came in with speed to poke the puck away from the Maple Leafs’ goaltender.

After Hoglander scored his second of the game to spot the Canucks a 2-0 lead, Conor Garland scored the first of his two goals on the evening that made it 3-0. William Nylander got caught out of position on Vancouver’s rush and ended up at the net as the puck went in.

“I got outskated on that third goal,” Nylander admitted. The small stuff like that cost us but I think we did a good job coming back.

In the second period, the Leafs got goals two goals from Nylander and one from Jake McCabe in the span of 3:27. After falling behind late once again late in the second period after Garland’s second of the game, the Leafs punched back with a shorthanded goal from Mitch Marner, only to surrender consecutive power-play goals to Vancouver’s J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson to put the game away.

“We have to look at it,” Marner said of his club’s special teams. “We pride ourselves in helping our teams win games and just our special teams in general hasn’t been good enough for quite a while now.”

The Maple Leafs did a lot of good things. When you look at the stats sheet, you’ll see that they had 56 percent of the high-danger scoring chances at even strength, per NaturalStatTrick.com. But Keefe has reached a point where the moral victories within the game are over.

“As much as we fight back, which I love, and I like a lot of the things we did to start the second period to get us back in the game, you can’t spot a team three (goals) and expect to win, especially a top team in the league right now,” Keefe said.

It was Wednesday when the coach effectively called out his team following an off day and said that 42 games into the season he didn’t know who to trust in the critical situations. This wasn’t that. But the Leafs have had many games where they’ve had slow starts only to will their way back.

“It’s not like we went away by any means,” Maple Leafs defenseman Jake McCabe said. “We competed all the way through to the final buzzer. Guys are battled our nuts off out there”

It could just be that the Maple Leafs midway through the season, are just that…mid. With the Tampa Bay Lightning winning on Saturday, the Leafs fell back to fourth place in the Atlantic Division and have a 24-17-5.

“That was pretty pathetic,” Marner said of his team’s opening effort. “We knew the pace of the game was going to be very high and very competitive and we didn’t bring it in the first period and I like our response in the second.”

If the win against the Flames was the blip in a string of six games, the Leafs could be in some trouble.

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