Marner leads Leafs past Bruins for ninth straight home win

Kristen Shilton

TSN Toronto Maple Leafs Reporter

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TORONTO – Life without Auston Matthews may not be so bad for the Maple Leafs. Not when Mitch Marner plays like he did on Saturday night.

Taking on the Boston Bruins for the final time this regular season, Marner produced his second four-point performance of the season to help Toronto rally to a 4-3 victory.

Playing on a line with William Nylander and Zach Hyman for the first time, Marner got in on each of the Leafs’ scoring chances. This was not only a testament to how strong his individual game was, but to the collective desire of the Leafs to minimize Matthews’ loss.

“I think just everyone in this room wanted to step up,” Marner said. “We talked about what a big role [Matthews] has on this team, so we can’t sit back and relax. We have to all keep our foot on the pedal and make sure we do more just to fill that void. We didn’t give [Boston] a lot of speed coming into our zone, but at the same time I think we were playing fast, playing heavy in their zone and getting pucks into the net.”

The win was Toronto’s ninth straight at home, matching the franchise record for home winning streak set in 1953 and 2007. It also put the Leafs at 7-4 on the season when Matthews isn’t in the lineup, and 3-1 without Matthews this season against Boston.

Toronto has lost only twice in their last 15 games and during that span, Marner has tallied 19 points (10 goals, nine assists) and failed to register at least a point in only four games.

His goal and three assists on Saturday put him at 51 points on the season, passing Matthews as the Leafs’ leading scorer.

“I think that confidence is there for [Marner],” said Nazem Kadri, who scored twice on the power play. “As an offensive player, once you start getting the rhythm, you feel like you’re scoring and putting points on the board and contributing offensively, you just catch a rhythm and get on a streak that [Marner] seems to be on right now.”

It wasn’t even until Saturday morning that Marner knew he wouldn’t be playing in the spot Babcock assigned him before Toronto’s recent run began. He had been slotted on the Leafs’ checking line with Nazem Kadri and Patrick Marleau but was replaced there for Saturday’s contest by Leo Komarov.

Still, flanking Nylander for his first game at centre since Dec. 20 suited Marner just fine and gave the Leafs more balance against Boston’s bruising top line of Patrice Bergeron, David Pasternak and Brad Marchand.

But containing that line in full wasn’t going to be an easy task regardless of the matchup, and Marchand found the back of the net twice in the first 15:02 of the opening period.

“We want Mitch to generate offence, and if you play against [Bergeron’s] line, in the pre-scout no one was generating any offence against him,” said Babcock. “So we were trying to figure out how to get two lines to create offence, and then saw it off. In the end, they didn’t saw it off, the defence made a couple mistakes, but I thought those guys were very dynamic, fast, played well.”

While Marchand lit the lamp twice for Boston in the first, Marner left that frame with a goal and an assist on Nazem Kadri’s power play goal. Jake DeBrusk gave the Bruins a 3-2 lead in the second before Marner connected with Kadri again to even the score before the third period. It was the first time Toronto had scored multiple power play goals since Dec. 19 and the fifth time this season Kadri had put up a multi-goal game.

It looked like the game was headed for overtime, deadlocked at 3-3, when things got even more interesting.  Ron Hainsey scored the game-winner for the Leafs on an assist from Marner with 1:23 left in the third, but the play underwent a lengthy review for a goalie interference challenge.

After several minutes, the call on the ice was confirmed and Marner secured his fourth point of the game.

“He’s doing a heck of a job coming back defensively, he’s all over the ice, and pucks seem to find him right now,” said Hainsey of Marner. “He made a great play on the faceoff right before we scored when he went around and took an off-angle shot but it was a good play. The puck seems to be coming to him and…he’s starting to really finish. It’s certainly a nice weapon to have going.”

It’s a weapon the Leafs will need as long as Matthews is sidelined, and after he returns as well.

Earning two points on Saturday put Toronto one point ahead of Boston for second place in the Atlantic Division, but the Bruins still have five games in hand. A playoff meeting remains entirely probable, and taking the season series 3-1 on the strength of a solid game gives the Leafs a boost to build from if that scenario materializes.

“I think it is good we played well against this team because overall we haven’t,” said Hainsey. “It was good to play good against them, it gives you confidence I think certainly. But a month and a half from now, if that is the [playoff] matchup, there will be a lot of different stuff going. It’s never bad to play well.”

Takeaways

Taking centre stage

Shifting to the middle in Matthews’ absence is nothing new for Nylander this season – he did it for the majority of the previous 10 games his linemate missed with injury – and he handled the adjustment well once again on Saturday. Skating with Marner was a definite perk for Nylander, offering him a highly-skilled player in Matthews’ vein to work off of.

There was instant chemistry between the trio, as evidence on Marner’s first goal. Nylander had the puck on a string in the Bruins’ end and fired a perfectly timed cross-ice pass to Marner in the left circle, where he could capitalize on Tukka Rask’s gaping net. Elsewhere, Nylander showed the same dynamic skating and playmaking abilities that have made the second half of his season so strong.

He has a tendency to hold the puck too long when he’s playing on the wall, but in the middle he was making quick passes to his linemates and forechecking well.

Nylander’s work in the faceoff dot was below average at 47 per cent on the night, but that’s been a work in progress for him all season. He finished plus-two with one shot on goal.

Aid for Andersen

Andersen has been the Leafs’ best player all season long, and without Matthews in the lineup, they’d be looking to him even more for those key saves. And it wasn’t that Andersen was directly at fault for any of Boston’s early goals; he just couldn’t mask the defensive breakdowns that led to those scoring chances as well as he has been.

In other areas of the game though, Andersen looked more average than usual, especially in his rebound control. There was a pair of instances in the second period where he fired back two big rebounds into the slot that had to be batted away, and seemed to struggle tracking the puck through traffic in front of him.

In the second period, Andersen saw only two shots on net from the Bruins, putting his save percentage at only .500 in that frame. That little work can be an issue for goalies leading to a netminder getting cold in their crease, but Andersen faced an early flurry of shots in the third period that seemed to help settle him in more.

Andersen has set the bar high for himself this season with too many superhuman stops to count, but when he’s not at his best, the Leafs have to find ways to pick him up, which hasn’t been a great strength of theirs this season.

Saturday was the fewest shots (23) that Andersen had seen since Jan. 20 in Ottawa, with his .870 save percentage on the night the lowest he’d posted since that game as well.

Leivo looking for more

It’s no secret Josh Leivo has been frustrated by his lack of playing time with the Leafs over the past season and a half. In fact, it was the last time Toronto played the Bruins on Feb. 3 that word first leaked out about Leivo’s agent requesting a trade away from Toronto if the team didn’t intend to play him. Three weeks later, Leivo finally got back in the lineup for the first time since Dec. 31, a span of 23 games being a healthy scratch.

\Playing on the fourth line, Leivo wasn’t going to get the offensive zone starts and ample ice time that might have helped him light up the scoresheet, as he did in a top-nine role last season, but from the first period on, it was clear Leivo would use every second his skates touched the ice to try and have an impact.

Early in the first period, Leivo outraced the Bruins to negate an icing and set up a scoring chance for his line and he was forechecking hard throughout the game.

Leivo has always had a strong presence in front of the net and he was driving Rask’s crease on multiple occasions looking for rebounds and getting pucks back to the point.

Leivo also saw some time on the power play in the second period, stepping into Matthews’ spot and drawing another penalty to give Toronto a 5-on-3 power play that eventually set up Kadri’s second goal with the man advantage.

After the game, Babcock said Leivo’s first outing in nearly two months was “fine.” He finished with one shot on goal in 8:28 ice time.

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