When the Toronto Maple Leafs play host to the Montreal Canadiens on Wednesday night to open the NHL season, there will be excitement in one city and angst in the other.
The excitement in Toronto actually started in the first week of July when John Tavares left the New York Islanders as a free agent to sign with his hometown team. The thought of Tavares, Auston Matthews and Nazem Kadri as the Leafs’ top three centres has fans giddily anticipating the payoff of the team’s rebuilding plan.
In Montreal, the mood has been growing steadily sour since P.K. Subban was traded two summers ago and increased through the Alex Galchenyuk and Max Pacioretty trades this summer. With defenceman Shea Weber, the bounty from the Subban trade, out until perhaps Christmas because of knee surgery, it did not help matters when Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin insisted recently he was not rebuilding but still thought this season’s Habs will make the playoffs.
Funny thing – the Canadiens’ fans emotions run through centre in large part as well. As in, the Canadiens don’t have any good ones. Galchenyuk long wanted to play his natural position but more than one Habs coach said no and then he was traded to the Arizona Coyotes for winger Max Domi, who was promptly moved to centre. Teams this weak down the middle do not pose threats in the postseason.
In the Leafs’ dressing room, the players are just as excited as the fans.
“We’re all eager to get the season started,” right winger Mitch Marner said. “We love playing with each other. We know what we have in this room, we know what we can accomplish. We’re just making sure we don’t get ahead of ourselves and have fun.”
Marner himself is the centre of the excitement along with Tavares. They clicked as a pair immediately and ran up 13 points between them in the preseason games. They were also at the centre of an explosive first power-play unit that features Matthews, Kadri and Morgan Rielly.
While questions remain about the defence, especially on the right side, even head coach Mike Babcock admits to the odd flutter of anticipation.
“The team’s got better, so it’s exciting,” said Babcock, who then reminded his interrogators the giddy forecasts are for the media, while he tends to break the season down into five-game segments and guides his players through them.
“We know we’ve got segment one coming up, we got a game against Montreal,” Babcock said. “You guys are paid to get ahead of yourselves, forecast, do all that stuff. It doesn’t much matter to me. We’ve just got to get ready for the first five games and be prepared to play. We’ve got to get better every day or we have no chance at the end.”
The structure of the NHL does not allow for much daydreaming on the part of the players and coaches. The differences in quality between the 31 teams are slimmer than ever before and the playoff setup means a team can see a great regular season disappear in the first round of the playoffs.
If you don’t win your division and your division is the best one in the conference, then you are practically guaranteed to face an equal or greater opponent in the first round and an even better one in the second. That is what happened to the Maple Leafs last season when they lost in seven games to the more experienced Boston Bruins.
The bad news for the Leafs is that even though the Washington Capitals were first in the Metropolitan Division and won the Stanley Cup, their Atlantic Division remains the strongest one in the Eastern Conference. So it will be another battle with the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Bruins, who will probably be the playoff opponents in the first two rounds.
“Last year we had an unbelievable regular season and still left early,” Babcock said. “You’ve got to have an unreal regular season to get in the playoffs and the way the NHL’s set up now, you play a real good opponent in the first two rounds – unbelievable. You’ve got to be fortunate and you’ve got to be good.”
Aside from Tavares, the Leafs will have several new faces in the lineup on Wednesday night. With Matthews’s regular partner William Nylander on the sidelines because of a salary dispute, free agent Tyler Ennis moves to right wing on that line with Patrick Marleau playing the left side.
Joining Tavares and Marner at left wing is Matthews’s former digger, Zach Hyman. Kadri will start the season with long-time spare part Josh Leivo on his left and Connor Brown on the right. Par Lindholm won the fourth-line centre job in training camp and plays with Andreas Johnsson and Kasperi Kapanen.
On defence, the new face is 25-year-old Russian rookie Igor Ozhiganov. He will play the right side on the third pair with second-year-man Travis Dermott.
Goaltender Frederik Andersen will have a new backup. Garret Sparks, who was named the American Hockey League’s top goalie last season because of his work with the Toronto Marlies, beat out incumbent Curtis McElhinney and farmhand Calvin Pickard for the job.
McElhinney and Pickard were both lost on waivers Tuesday, leaving the Marlies farm team with just Finnish prospect Kasimir Kaskisuo as the prospective starter and wiping out the Leafs’ depth at the position.
However, both the Carolina Hurricanes, who took McElhinney, and the Philadelphia Flyers, who claimed Pickard, were hit by goalie injuries, which means either or both of the lost Leafs could be reclaimed on waivers in several weeks.
“Kaskisuo in the minors is standing by himself and yet that’s the way the league is made,” Babcock said. “It’s made to try and keep everybody exactly the same. So that’s the way it goes. You’d love to have them all slip through, but they didn’t.”