OTTAWA – John-Michael Liles barely kept track of the NHL while spending most of the season in the American Hockey League. He got a representative look at the good and the bad of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators on Saturday night.
My how expectations have changed on both sides of the Battle of Ontario since the year began.
The Leafs continue to tempt fate and find a way to barely get by. They surrendered another 50 shots to Ottawa and walked away with a 4-3 shootout win, making them 3-for-3 in games where they’ve given up that many to the opposition.
For Ottawa, this was another one that got away. The Sens have now dropped five straight games at Canadian Tire Centre and are entering a make-or-break December that will see them play a team-record 11 games here overall. On Saturday, they once again dug an early hole and didn’t make good on enough of their offensive opportunities – particularly during the opening two periods.
When you add it all up, the playoff picture drifted a little further from view with the Leafs now eight points up on Ottawa for the final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference. However, neither team seemed particularly happy with its performance after an entertaining evening of hockey.
“It seems like we work hard for 40 minutes of the game and establish the type of game that we want to play, then we take some penalties that change the momentum and we don’t seem to be able to get it back,” said Leafs coach Randy Carlyle. “Tonight they scored two power-play goals that we should have had coverage on, you know? But we won the hockey game, found a way to win, and that’s the most important thing.
“We’ve had some pretty down times here prior to the last two games, so no matter how you get the points we’re going to take it and move on.”
There were several bright spots in the team’s first road victory since Oct. 30 in Calgary. James Reimer was excellent in goal and improved to 9-1-1 in his career against Ottawa. Phil Kessel and James van Riemsdyk both kept up their recent hot play – JVR had a goal, two assists and the shootout winner – while Liles looked sharp in his first NHL action of the season.
Despite all of that, it was impossible to look past all of the familiar problems, from the shots against to the eight minor penalties to the way the team sat back after building a 3-1 lead through two periods.
“When we skate and we attack, we can be a hockey club that can have success,” said Carlyle. “When we sit back and receive the game we allow the opposition to dictate the pace.”
Down the hall in the home dressing room, the mounting frustration was evident. After two seasons of unexpected success as the Cinderella Sens, the weight of expectations is obviously being felt now.
This was a game Ottawa knew it had to have and easily could have. It was 1-1 early in the second period when Zach Smith tried to draw a penalty by going down in the Toronto zone and wound up watching as van Riemsdyk and Kessel hooked up on a 2-on-1 at the other end of the ice. A few minutes later, it was Sens defenceman Marc Methot driving van Riemsdyk into goaltender Craig Anderson just as Jake Gardiner was making it 3-1 for Toronto.
Despite that, the Sens managed to rally with 14 third-period shots and could at least take some solace in salvaging one point in the standings.
“We did a lot of good things – this is something we can build off of,” said Ottawa captain Jason Spezza. “Even when we got behind, we talked about it between the second and third, we knew (the third) was one of our most important periods of the season.
“It’s a big battle back game. We couldn’t afford to drop two points.”
Both teams have now played 30 games and will need to be better than they were in this one to find their way back to the post-season. Toronto is essentially in the exact same place it was the last two seasons with 35 points – it had 33 through 30 games last year and 35 through 30 games the year before that – and those campaigns ended up going in opposite directions.
Ottawa has been a playoff team both of those years and is facing a tall task to make it three in a row.
At this point, the biggest difference between these teams is the goaltending. While Reimer and Jonathan Bernier have consistently lifted the Leafs to victories they probably shouldn’t have had, Anderson has struggled to match the otherworldly performance he had during the lockout-shortened campaign for Ottawa.
Whether those trends continue is anyone’s guess. However, you’d have to think that Toronto’s luck will run out eventually if it keeps getting outshot by 20 every night.
“It’s just something that’s going on,” said Reimer. “My job is stop them, whether there’s 10 shots or 100 shots.”