Columnist image

TSN Toronto Maple Leafs Reporter

| Archive

TORONTO – Mike Babcock isn’t known to be extravagant with his praise of individual players, so when the Maple Leafs head coach called winger Zach Hyman “the best forechecker in hockey,” on Monday, it didn’t go unnoticed.

“It’s a big honour, a huge compliment,” Hyman said after practice on Tuesday. “It’s nice when a coach appreciates what you do.”

Perhaps more than any player on the Leafs’ roster, Hyman has experienced the best and worst of what hockey in Toronto has to offer.

On one hand, he’s a fixture on the Maple Leafs’ top line, attached at the hip to emerging star Auston Matthews. But given that his game is centred on hard work more than flash, Hyman is also regularly maligned by fans and media for being the wrong choice to skate with the offensively explosive Matthews and William Nylander.

It’s a circumstance exacerbated by Toronto’s off-season acquisition of left winger Patrick Marleau, a 14-time 20-goal scorer.

Marleau has a career 13.4 per cent shooting percentage, more than twice as high as Hyman’s 6.4 per cent shooting percentage last season, which was well below the league average of 9.2 per cent. Hyman scored just six even-strength goals despite the talent around him. But as he prepares for his second year in the NHL, lighting the lamp isn’t really Hyman’s thing. Not anymore, anyway.

In his final season with the Hamilton Red Wings of the Ontario Jr. Hockey League in 2010-11, Hyman scored 102 points in 43 games to earn Canadian Junior Hockey League player of the year honours. That same year he was selected in the fifth round, 123rd overall, by the Florida Panthers in the NHL Entry Draft, right before he started at the University of Michigan on a hockey scholarship.

It was there that everything changed. The “best forechecker in hockey” was born in Ann Arbor.

“My first couple years in college I wasn’t scoring goals or anything,” Hyman said of posting just six goals in his first 79 games. “So I had to do something to be hard to play against. That became being hard on the puck and being on the forecheck, killing penalties. I had to find out what I was good at, and that was it.”

Hyman’s final year at Michigan was his best; he was a first-team All-American and Hobey Baker finalist who led the Big Ten with 54 points (22 goals, 32 assists) in 37 games. The Leafs noticed Hyman’s emergence, and in June 2015 sent Greg McKegg to Florida in exchange for him and a seventh-round draft choice.

After the Leafs drafted Matthews first overall in 2016, Babcock saw the potential for Hyman to step back into the role he played alongside Dylan Larkin at Michigan. From the coach’s perspective, Hyman’s task is to put pucks on the stick of Matthews and Nylander and let them go.

“It’s fine, they share it. I’m the guy in front of the net trying to make space for them,” Hyman said. “It’s tougher when you’re sharing the puck between three. And if I’m in front of the net, the puck is going to come to me when one of those guys shoots it, and then I’ll go get it back for them. When Auston and Willy have the puck, I mean, it’s Auston and Willy, right? So you know that’s good.”

Thus far, Matthews has never experienced more than the occasional post-penalty kill shift without Hyman at 5-on-5. Having one scorer with him and another linemate focused on puck retrieval was an adjustment at first, but the results have been hard to argue.

“I think Babs likes that dynamic and we’ve been pretty successful,” Matthews said. “I’m going to play with whoever coach puts with me and so far I think it’s been able to work pretty well. [Zach’s] mastered the job of getting in there on the forecheck and getting the puck back. He’s really good at it.”