PHILADELPHIA – It wasn’t all that long ago that the Maple Leafs looked way too top-heavy.
Four players were scoring most of the goals — like, 60 percent of the goals. Top. Heavy.
No longer.
Over the last five weeks, during a stretch that’s seen them win 12 of 16 games, the Leafs have been getting goals from all over the place.
Six different players scored in a blowout win over the Flyers on Thursday night. Auston Matthews was among them (that’s 55 goals now on the year), but so were Pontus Holmberg, Timothy Liljegren, Matthew Knies, Tyler Bertuzzi, and William Nylander.
Fourteen different players have scored at least once over that 16-game stretch.
The biggest out-of-nowhere surprise there, by far, is Bobby McMann and those eight goals. Increasingly less surprising now is the frequent contributions from Bertuzzi. He’s up to 13 goals on the season after tapping in a pass from Matthews to get the Leafs on the board in Philly.
Bertuzzi scored only once during a 32-game stretch at one point. He couldn’t buy a goal.
Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe kept believing, kept insisting, this would come for the 29-year-old.
Why?
“Probably the biggest thing is the number of chances that he had, so close in and around the net that just hadn’t been going in for him,” Keefe said, noting yet another Bertuzzi goal that was called back on a hand pass on Thursday.
Bertuzzi is shooting 22 percent over his last 16 games. The chances that weren’t falling before are falling now.
“He’s a little bit slimy,” Timothy Liljegren said of Bertuzzi’s play around the blue paint, “jumps all over the place, hard to read, I guess. He has a lot of second and third efforts.”
Bertuzzi’s re-emergence is a big deal for the Leafs. He’s the likeliest Leaf to score in a playoff series after the big four of Matthews, Nylander, Mitch Marner, and John Tavares. Bertuzzi had five goals in seven playoff games for the Bruins last spring.
“It’s good to see,” Keefe said. “He’s an important piece of our team.”
Others, such as Knies, also are also coming around.
The rookie winger went 17 consecutive games without a goal from late December until early February.
He’s still figuring out how exactly to score in the NHL.
“I mean, it’s way harder,” he said after potting his 12th goal of the season. “It’s not easy to score, especially five-on-five. It’s hard to get Grade-A (chances). I feel like when you get them, you have to capitalize.”
“You can just feel almost the adrenaline,” Knies said of when those chances did come around, “like, you know, this could be your one opportunity for the game.”
Knies has chipped in with four goals since that long drought.
“I think a lot of my goals have come around the net,” he said. “So, the more I’m around there and can free up my stick for a chance, for it to come to me.”
That’s key, Knies says, making his stick available. That’s especially true when he plays with Marner.
“Just not having the defender lift my stick,” he said, “getting it on the ice, making sure I can tip every puck. That’s kinda what I’ve learned, is a lot of the goals that I feel like I’m gonna score while I’m here (in the NHL) is going to be around the net. That’s why I want to be there.”
Then there are others, such as Max Domi, now pitching in. Domi scored only four times in the first 49 games of the season. He has four goals in 16 games since.
The Leafs have even gotten contributions here and there from defenders not named Morgan Rielly, including a pair of goals from Jake McCabe over the last month or so.
McCabe has scored a career-high six goals this season.
Will this kind of secondary scoring persist, especially down the stretch and into the postseason?
The way that Keefe adjusted his lineup after the trade deadline – namely, moving David Kämpf into the third-line centre position – makes it more likely that the Leafs will only be able to rely on their top two lines for offence.
That was what drove the Leafs to keep Kämpf out of that position for most of the season. They wanted three lines that could score, not two. The way things were going defensively with Tavares and Domi both in the middle made that setup untenable defensively, though – hence the return of Kämpf as the 3C.
The Leafs coach will have to adjust his lineup again with Calle Järnkrok now out for the foreseeable future. He crashed into the boards in the second period on Thursday and didn’t return. The Leafs are already without Marner, who hasn’t skated since he was injured in Boston.
Keefe will have to get creative for the time being.
In the end, of course, it will be Marner, Matthews, Nylander and, to a lesser extent, Tavares, that the Leafs lean on most for offence.
But they need help.
They’re getting it now.
(Photo of Auston Matthews, Morgan Rielly, Tyler Bertuzzi and Pontus Holmberg: Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)
