TORONTO — It would be all too simple to chalk it up to a bad break.
A puck careening off an official’s skate deep in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ zone, just half a period left in a 1-1 game. The Washington Capitals pouncing, the ice tilting, the home side coming out on the wrong end of it. A hard-fought back-and-forth, undone by a moment of chaos.
Except, for those on the other side of the glass, it wasn’t all that hard-fought, before or after the haphazard game-winner.
“They outworked us tonight. They deserved to win,” defender Chris Tanev said of the visiting Capitals after the final buzzer sounded on a 3-1 loss under the Scotiabank Arena lights Friday. “They were connected. They played five quick, they forechecked us really hard, smothered us a little bit. We’ve got to do a better job of handling pressure — what they did to us, that’s what we want to do to other teams.”
His coach agreed, a terse Craig Berube taking the podium in the bowels of the arena late Friday and offering praise only for the team who left with the win.
“They were just more competitive than us,” Berube said of the Caps. “Played a harder game than us, won more puck battles than us, skated better than us. They were just better.”
There were signs of a night that might go awry early, when those competitive Caps came flying out of the gates, hemming the Maple Leafs in their own zone through the early stretch of the first period, forcing Anthony Stolarz into action before the fans packing the stands had even settled into their seats.
It didn’t get much better as the game wore on. While the visitors didn’t necessarily stack chance after chance on the home side, the Capitals, still without their goal-scoring talisman Alex Ovechkin, simply kept coming in waves. And the Maple Leafs found themselves floundering.
“They’re obviously playing really good hockey. They took a lot of time and space away, and I don’t think we played through that pressure well enough, the way we’re capable of,” John Tavares said of his team’s performance. “When we had the opportunity to get on the forecheck, I just don’t think we were as quick as we needed to be.”
“Just their tenacity on the forecheck — they were putting pressure on us all night, hemming us in our zone. It seemed like they just wanted it more,” added netminder Stolarz, who did his best to keep his club in it throughout. “You can see why their record is what it is — they work extremely hard, get pucks to the net, get bodies to the net. They force the other team to work. And that’s what they did to us tonight.”
The Caps eventually broke through early in the second frame, coming out hard again, and snagging the game’s opening goal — a net-front deflection from Nic Dowd — as a result.
A period later, after the Maple Leafs had tied it up and found themselves hunting for another, the club’s affinity for disconnected sequences in their own zone finally burned them.
The puck came to Morgan Rielly first, the veteran defender sending it around the boards behind Stolarz, to a waiting Marner. The star winger collected it and pushed deeper into his own zone along the wall, pressured by Washington’s relentless forecheck. Auston Matthews arrived to help, digging out the puck and skating even deeper into the corner — the recently-returned captain attempted a backhand pass behind Stolarz to a waiting Conor Timmins, only to see the puck hit a referee’s skate instead, and bounce into Stolarz’s crease.
Two Caps converged, getting there before the scrambling Maple Leafs, the goal eventually tucked home by Washington’s Connor McMichael.
“It’s just one of those things,” Stolarz said of the bad bounce. “The refs are a part of the game, and we have to live with it. You just kind of forget it, put it in the rear-view mirror. You just have to go out and worry about your next shift.”
“It’s hockey. It happens,” added Tanev. “Still 10 or 12 minutes left in the game for us to try and score. We had some chances at the end. Obviously, they didn’t go in. … We’ve got to worry about just playing harder, moving pucks, working as a five-man unit.”
His coach echoed the sentiment. Bad bounce or not, it wasn’t that arrow from the hockey gods that sunk the home side on Friday night, in his view — it was the habits that allowed for the sequence to happen at all.
“The bottom line is, instead of just going the other way with the puck, we brought it back too much tonight,” Berube said of the ill-fated play post-game. “It started with the first period on, the whole game. And that eventually bit us. It cost us.
“We didn’t play a north game, we didn’t play fast tonight. They were the better team. They deserved to win.”
If there was one brief moment of joy for the blue-and-white in an ultimately lacklustre affair, it was the one that came midway through the second period — when Tanev hit a streaking Tavares with an inch-perfect stretch pass, and No. 91 channelled vintage Sidney Crosby, beating netminder Charlie Lindgren with a forehand-backhand beauty.
Asked about the pass that set up the club’s only goal on the night, Toronto’s rugged No. 8 made clear where his priorities lay, how he feels about the highlight-reel plays that his club has become known for, on a night like this one.
“Who cares? We lost,” Tanev said simply. “We need to come and be ready with a better effort tomorrow.”