SAN JOSE — Craig Berube was worried about this one. The Toronto Maple Leafs coach saw a trap coming.
“You can’t come in here and take anybody lightly, including this team,” Berube said Thursday morning, before the Leafs faced the league-worst San Jose Sharks. “We gotta check well. We gotta be on our toes. We gotta be solid defensively and manage the hockey puck. Sometimes you tend to get a little loose coming in here or other buildings where the teams aren’t in the playoffs … and you try to do too much with the puck and you end up turning it over in bad areas and not playing to the identity. And that’s gonna be key tonight, playing to our identity.”
It didn’t happen.
The Leafs hatched a furious last-minute comeback to force overtime, only to lose 6-5 in a shootout to the Sharks for the second time this season. In other words, they were swept by a team at the very bottom of the NHL standings.
“I didn’t love our game tonight,” Auston Matthews said postgame. “I thought we just seemed slow, didn’t really seem to take care of the puck much – just kinda messing around with it too much.”
Penalties and special teams were sore spots too, Matthews added. “That’s just stuff that is controllable by us and just needs to be better,” he said.
Nabbing one point certainly didn’t hurt in the tightly contested fight for the Atlantic Division title, but given the opponent, this was a game the Leafs needed to have. And requiring overtime just to scratch out that one point meant that Matthews and Mitch Marner both had to log over 25 minutes.
“We made some mistakes,” Berube said. “We all gotta be better, goalie included. It’s not good enough.”
Though it’s hardly an excuse and not one Matthews would use, travel was a factor: The Leafs played Tuesday night at home in Toronto, flew out to San Jose on Wednesday morning, and then played at 7:30 p.m. local time on Thursday.
“The schedule is what it is. There’s nothing we can do about that,” Matthews said. “We gotta find a way to compete and we gotta find a way to play each night despite what kinda comes at us.”
Division-title slip-up
This is the second time in the last three games the Leafs have been beaten (and outplayed) by a team far out of the playoff picture. They lost 5-2 in Nashville last Saturday.
Though the Leafs, now with 90 points, nudged their way ahead of the Florida Panthers (89, with a game in hand) and the Tampa Bay Lightning (89) in the race for the Atlantic, there was an opportunity to gain more ground.
A loss like this lessens the margin for error when the Leafs meet those teams again down the stretch, with two games left against the Panthers and one more with the Lightning.
“I think we’ve been thinking about that all year,” Matthews said of winning the Atlantic. “I know ourselves, the two Florida teams, it’s a tight race. It’s up for grabs. We want to win that, for sure.”
The Leafs will face the sizzling Los Angeles Kings on Saturday, followed by another rebuilding club, the Anaheim Ducks, on Sunday.
The Leafs were outplayed by an inferior team
The Leafs were chasing the game for most of the night, especially in the first period when the Sharks pelted Joseph Woll with 16 shots.
“They were coming hard,” William Nylander said. “They obviously want to beat us. They’re young and talented and fast.”
The leaks and defensive miscues that Berube feared came to pass.
Among the bigger errors: The Sharks converting on a shorthanded goal when the Leafs had them outnumbered coming back and Woll inadvertently cleared a puck right off the skate of William Eklund and into his own net.
Macklin Celebrini scored the shootout winner for the Sharks. (D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)
Max Domi also took a needless roughing double-minor, plus a 10-minute misconduct, that left the Leafs shorthanded.
A penalty kill that’s trying to find its way could not kill off a Nick Robertson tripping penalty. A Simon Benoit pinch had no support, leading to an odd-man rush and the third Sharks goal.
The Sharks were the better team at five-on-five throughout, winning 55 percent of the expected goals. They generated more in and around the net, as well as off the rush, than the Leafs would like to give up.
Two of the Leafs’ five goals came on the power play. Two more came during the last minute of regulation when the Leafs had an extra attacker.
Scott Laughton scored the lone five-on-five goal for Toronto, his first goal and point in 10 games as a Leaf.
Nylander keeps climbing
Nylander hit a new career-high for goals, edging beyond 40 for the first time. He banged in his 41st of the season on a first-period power play and added his 42nd on the game-tying goal with 14 seconds left in regulation.
Nylander finished with 40 goals on the nose in the previous two seasons.
He trails only Leon Draisaitl in the Rocket Richard Trophy race, a race that Draisaitl, with 49 goals (but hurt at the moment), will likely win.
Nylander needs only one goal (259), meanwhile, to match Wendel Clark (260) for ninth-most in Leafs franchise history.
The power play stays hot
That Nylander goal was the 13th for the Leafs power play this month. Matthews would add another. The unit’s success rate in March: A blistering 43.8 percent.
Any doubts that the five-forward first unit would remain intact for the postseason have disappeared.
The Leafs celebrate William Nylander’s game-tying goal. (D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)
“I think just being able to score in different ways, finding different areas of the ice,” Matthews said of the unit’s effectiveness. “I think we’re moving the puck pretty well, not forcing too much.”
It wasn’t a perfect night for the power play though, what with the shorthanded goal against. “We have guys back. That shouldn’t happen,” Berube said.
“It’s just another mistake that led to the loss of the hockey game.”
Joseph Woll stumbles
Woll’s blunder on the giveaway to Eklund gave the Sharks a two-goal lead in the second. The Leafs probably also need a save on the previous goal, when Alexander Wennberg managed to sneak a shot through Woll following that Benoit pinch.
“He’s part of it all,” Berube said. “We gotta be better than that.”
Woll was making his 38th start of the season.
It’s notable that the Leafs gave him the start against San Jose in that it sets up Anthony Stolarz to start against a more difficult opponent, the Kings, this weekend.
Woll and Stolarz are wrestling for control of the crease in the playoffs. This start — five goals against on 35 shots — was a clear step backward for Woll in that fight.
(Top photo: D. Ross Cameron / Imagn Images)