The Maple Leafs Have a Justin Holl Problem and It May Cost Them the Series
Justin Holl's poor play and Sheldon Keefe's insistence on sticking with him may prove to be the Toronto Maple Leafs' undoing, writes Mike Stephens.
It's important to remember that no team lives or dies on the back of one player.
The sheer number of moving parts in each moment of a hockey game necessitates that every outcome, good or bad, stems from the fruits of a collective effort. Sure, some players can impart a greater influence than others. But, in the grand scheme of things, teams win and lose together.
What we're seeing with Justin Holl in Toronto's first-round series versus the Tampa Bay Lightning, though, is testing that theory to its limit.
Five games in, and the numbers are garish. Given the stakes, they're impossible to ignore.
The Lightning have pumped 19 goals past the Maple Leafs as of Friday morning. Holl has been on the ice for 14 of them. At 5-on-5, the Maple Leafs have been outscored by a margin of 9-2 during Holl's minutes, outshot 37-28 and outchanced in high-danger areas 18-12, according to naturalstattrick.com.
Holl's 37.05-percent expected goals share at 5-on-5 is the lowest of any Maple Leafs defenseman at the moment and the fourth-lowest on the team. His 38.10 percent share of the scoring chances ranks second-last among Toronto's defense corps, and his nine high-danger goals against in all strengths top the total of anyone else on the roster.
Simply put: In a series that – by their own doing, admittedly – will come to define the future of this franchise, the Maple Leafs are getting their heads caved in whenever Holl steps on the ice.
It cannot continue. Not if this team wants to earn its first taste of second-round hockey since before the iPod Shuffle was invented.
"My first response would be whether he's been on the ice by himself in those situations," said Sheldon Keefe when confronted with Holl's metrics following Toronto's Game 5 loss on Thursday night.
"I think the answer is he's not out there by himself in those situations, when he's getting scored on."
Holl might not be the only player on the ice when the Lightning have managed to put the puck in the Maple Leafs' net so far this series. His partner, Mark Giordano, has struggled mightily through these five games as well, while Toronto's fourth line of Kampf, Sam Lafferty and Zach Aston-Reese has forfeited the depth battle more times than not. Those lapses have all factored into Tampa's ability to keep this series going.
In fact, Holl has also been given arguably the most difficult minutes of anyone of the Leafs' blueline thus far. He's starting nearly the entirety of his shifts in the defensive zone while also anchoring a penalty kill tasked with shutting down the likes of Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, Steven Stamkos and Victor Hedman, among others.
That type of usage is bound to produce some less-than-favorable results. Even the most irrational, success-starved Leafs fan can recognize that.
But just because Holl logs difficult minutes doesn't mean his struggles can be waved away when he handles them as poorly as anyone could expect. And just because Holl isn't alone out there when the Maple Leafs get scored on doesn't negate the fact that he has been on the ice for more goals against than any of his teammates – 73.7 percent of them in total, to be precise.
We call that a common denominator. And Holl has become that in the worst way for the Maple Leafs so far – precisely when they can afford it the least.
To Keefe's credit, he actually attempted to pair Holl's workload back by a significant degree in Game 5. The 31-year-old Holl has averaged 18:29 in nightly ice time to this point in the series and yet was held to 12:33 on Thursday – by far his lowest of this five-game sample.
It's a natural response from a coach looking to help a struggling player. If that player hasn't been getting the job done in their initial role, reduce their minutes and shelter them, which is exactly what Keefe did.
The only problem is that, despite a concerted effort to make life easier for Holl, he still wound up on the ice for three Lightning goals in a game the Maple Leafs lost by one and an empty-netter.
He first missed an ill-timed open-ice hip check off the faceoff to allow the Lightning to storm the zone and tie the game just 25 seconds after Toronto opened the scoring in the first period. He was then caught flat-footed off the rush by Mikey Eyssimont in the second period to give an open path for the Tampa forward to blow by him and beat Ilya Samsonov five-hole. Finally, he followed Brayden Point behind the net despite the Lightning actively crashing the Leafs' crease before they banged home a loose puck to make it 3-1.
Holl played four minutes fewer than any of Toronto's five other defensemen on Thursday night and still wound up at the center of all three goals his team allowed.
When it comes to discerning one player's impact within a game that features 19 players working in unison over 60 minutes, this is about as obvious as it gets.
In the regular season, these struggles can be forgiven as merely a poor stretch from a player tasked with some seriously heavy lifting. But the Maple Leafs are not in the regular season. The playoffs require split-second adjustments that sometimes go against a team's overall process. And with the margin for error non-existent and the season on the line, that process can no longer be trusted – not if it won't promise results until after Monday's possible Game 7.
The Maple Leafs loaded up on nine NHL-caliber defensemen at the trade deadline this year for this exact reason – to have reinforcements waiting on standby in the event of an injury or disastrous results. Well, Option B has happened. Timothy Liljegren, who plays Holl's position and has produced the best on-ice results of his young career alongside Holl's most common defense partner, is watching it all unfold from six levels up.
If that continues, these Maple Leafs could look a whole lot different the next time they play hockey as important as this.
