The Maple Leafs were outclassed in a 5-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday. Toronto’s head coach derided his team’s play and called out his stars.
The Maple Leafs were outclassed in a 5-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday. Toronto’s head coach derided his team’s play and called out his stars.
EDMONTON — Sheldon Keefe is a self-admittedly emotional guy. But nowhere is it clearer than after a disappointing loss.
The Toronto Maple Leafs coach wasted no time in putting down his team's effort in a 5-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday.
"We just didn't play with any purpose or intelligence," he said. When Sportsnet's Luke Fox attempted to ask if he felt that new players making their debut had any effect on the outcome, Keefe cut him off.
"Zero."
The Maple Leafs were coming off several days of rest having not played since Sunday in a 5-1 win against the Seattle Kraken. But there's no question it's been a taxing few days for the club.
Over the course of both off days, the Leafs made four trades. The first one occurred on Monday as they acquired defenseman Jake McCabe and forward Sam Lafferty from the Chicago Blackhawks.
Both made their NHL debuts, but were challenged.
McCabe took a slashing penalty early in the game and that set the table for Oilers star Connor McDavid to score the first of two goals on the night. Lafferty committed a turnover that led to another goal. But it wasn’t the new guys that Keefe took issue with.
“I thought the new guys played fine but it’s the guys we regularly count on that weren’t good enough," he said.
And that's where Toronto's star players fell short. While McDavid was on one end of the ice putting himself in the record books by becoming just the third player in the last 100 years to record his fifth consecutive game with at least two goals, Toronto's star players were dreadful.
Keefe has been like this at times, most notably to begin the season when the team fell to the Montreal Canadiens in the season opener. Last season, he called his team “soft and purposeless” before walking back those comments with media at the next practice.
But with a lot the line, Keefe’s patience is wearing thin. And it’s not that he can’t accept losses. It’s losses with a poor effort that get him especially down on his players.
“At this level, we all have a good understanding of what you got to bring to the table and level of execution especially when you’re playing the No. 1 offensive team in the league and the type of year 97’s having,” the Maple Leafs captain said of McDavid and the Oilers. “We just didn’t do a good enough job, especially early, taking care of things in the neutral zone.”
It’ll take some adjusting
The Maple Leafs brought in a lot of new faces and McCabe admitted to being nervous early on. In particular, he seemed to have trouble adjusting to how often Toronto’s defense pinches as forwards come back to play up high.
“Just the forwards are a bit more responsible here getting above so it kind of gives up the green light to go down so we know we don’t have to give up odd-man rushes,” McCabe explained. “There’s different nuances throughout the systems in all three zones that I’m just getting used to.”
O’Reilly third line
Keefe teased over the course of the week that he wanted to see Ryan O’Reilly on the third line and with the game out of reach after two periods, the experiment happened sooner than expected. He had Lafferty and Alex Kerfoot on his win for just under three minutes. It was Toronto’s only line that had an expected goals above 50 percent, according to NaturalStatTrick.com
Other newcomers
Defensemen Erik Gustafsson and Luke Schenn were part of separate trades that occurred on Tuesday. The latter joined his teammate at Rogers Place in the evening and Gustafsson will join the Leafs in Calgary on Thursday.
As each player comes in, there’s bound to be more adjustment. But that’s where the stars need to help carry the team.