Five ways the Maple Leafs can retake momentum against the Lightning

May 5, 2022, 15:58 EDTUpdated: May 7, 2022, 01:53 EDT

Five ways the Maple Leafs can retake momentum against the Lightning

Terse? No. Too strong a word. But when the Toronto Maple Leafs showed up for a media availability at the Ford Performance Centre Thursday, they weren’t chatty, either. They didn’t seem like a team wanting to lament what went wrong in Game 2’s sloppy home loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning. They spoke with the brevity of a focused team eager to get back to work.

That was the vibe, at least. We won’t know how much Game 2 messed with their confidence until we see them early in Game 3 Friday at Amalie Arena against the back-to-back defending Stanley Cup champions.

The Leafs have undoubtedly given away some of the tremendous momentum they built in Game 1. Home-ice advantage is gone. So how do they retake control of this series?

Here are five areas they need to address if they want to win Game 3.

Discipline, Captain Obvious

The Leafs took seven penalties in Game 2 and the Lightning punished them by burying three power-play goals. The Leafs weren’t actually disciplined in Game 1, either. They handed the Lightning five power-plays in that one, too, most notably the five-minute major from Kyle Clifford’s hit on Ross Colton that got Clifford suspended for Game 2. So how do they stay out of the box in Game 3?

“Just move our feet, have good sticks,” said Leafs defenseman Mark Giordano Thursday. “You get into trouble when you stop moving your feet. You stop having good body position and you’re reaching and grabbing.”

The penalty ledger reflects that observation. The Leafs’ infractions in the series include two holding calls, three hooking, two trips and a slash – all plays that tend to happen when a flat-footed player gets beaten and has to reach.

Looking at the bigger picture, however: the Leafs have enjoyed 10 power plays of their own in the series, too. So the necessary adjustments they must make aren’t simply about their own behavior – they’re about understanding the changes in the officials’ behavior relative to other postseasons. They’re calling the games much more like regular-season contests so far, following the rulebook to a tee, and the Lightning are getting punished, too.

“Around the league it’s been a little bit of a surprise, frankly, how the rules have been called,” said Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe. “…It’s been a lot of the interference and obstruction and things you’re not used to seeing called so tightly at this time (of year). So that’s created a different feel from what you anticipate.”

As Auston Matthews put it Thursday: the Leafs need to keep the gritty play to between the whistles and avoid “the extracurricular stuff.”

Agitate – and make ’em retaliate

The Leafs can use the tighter officiating to their advantage. They were a reasonably disciplined team in the regular season, taking the 17^th-most penalties per 60 minutes in the NHL. The Lightning took the second-most. Their discipline has been a problem for many seasons in a row now. The Leafs can draw the likes of right winger Corey Perry, left winger Patrick Maroon and defenseman Erik Cernak into skirmishes by agitating them while staying on the right side of the line.

A player who can seriously help in that regard: first-line left winger Michael Bunting, who returned from his lower-body injury in Game 2 and scored Toronto’s first goal of the night. Mixing a pest presence with skill, Bunting ranked fifth in the NHL this season in penalties drawn per 60 minutes among 600 skaters who played at least 500 minutes at 5-on-5. His fiery energy could get under Tampa’s skin.

Be 90 percent as good as Andrei Vasilevskiy

Andrei Vasilevskiy’s accomplishments relative to age place him on a Hall of Fame trajectory and maybe even a top-10-goalie-of-all-time trajectory. Jack Campbell is not Andrei Vasilevskiy, nor should anyone expect him to be. He doesn’t have to be Vasilevsky’s equal in this series.

But Campbell has to be almost as good if the Leafs want to be competitive. He was fine in Game 2 – as Keefe noted Thursday, there was nothing Campbell could do on the power-play goals – but he did allow a clean breakaway goal against Perry with the score 1-0 right after Vasilevsky had robbed Timothy Liljegren with a glove save. The Leafs will need Campbell to come up with a few moments like that against a dangerous group of Tampa shooters before the series is up. Including the power plays, Vasilevskiy has faced 16 high-danger shots across the first two games. He’s stopped 15 of them. Campbell has faced 15 high-danger shots and stopped 12.

Campbell’s occasional lapses in confidence are well-documented, but he was determined to embrace the playoff pressure when he spoke Thursday.

“For me personally, it’s just exciting,” he said. “Turn the page and just play another hockey game against a great team. So it’ll be a lot of fun.”

He’ll need that positive attitude throughout the series given Vasilevskiy is so resilient. He’s now 15-0 with a .948 save percentage and five shutouts in playoff games following a loss since 2020.

Don’t led Victor Hedman dictate the pace

The towering defenseman Hedman pulled Game 2 into his orbit, burning the Leafs for Tampa’s first goal with three seconds remaining in the first period and racking up four points.

Hedman, a future Hall of Famer, is known for his exploits in all facets of the game, but he’s been particularly deadly offensively so far in the series. With him on the ice at 5-on-5 in Games 1 and 2, the Lightning got 62.9 percent of the scoring chances and 80 percent of the high-danger chances. The Leafs acknowledge they have to do a better job preventing him from creeping into the rush. If they don’t pay him special attention going forward, he’ll continue to control the game.

“He’s big, he’s strong, he can do everything out there offensively and defensively,” Matthews said. “He’s the anchor of their team. When you give him room and space for all those guys to feel good, it’ll boost their confidence like last night.”

Weather the opening storm

The last key to Game 3 qualifies as a playoff cliché. But clichés tend to exist because they’re true, and it’s undeniable that those first 10 minutes of a playoff game mean a ton for the road team. That’s when the crowd unleashes all its nervous energy, which rubs off on the home players. The Leafs will have to hang in against a revved up Amalie Arena crowd until the adrenaline dump.

Whether they do so to open Game 3 or get overwhelmed by the moment will give us a strong hint as to which version of the Leafs is the “real” one in this series: the confident, dominant squad of Game 1 or the messy, undisciplined group from Game 2.

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