Back in Time?
If you’re one of many living room couch potatoes or barflies who have witnessed any of the Leafs outings during their current three-game winless slide, you’ve felt like the Leafs have traveled back in time.
It’s only fitting that this eerie sense of dimensional teleportation is coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Back To The Future”.
Movie buffs will recognize October 26th as the date that Marty McFly first embarked on his adventure through time, as indicated by the programming circuits on Doc Brown’s DeLorean.
Leafs fans just know it as the date that the team needs to rebound with a win over Florida at Air Canada Centre, to regain the collective spark that was evident during their four-game season-opening winning streak.
The last three games have left viewers scratching their heads wondering if they have indeed been witnessing a unit that appears to be an incarnation of their 2009-10 selves when they were the second- worst team in the league.
“Oh, they couldn’t score often, but they just ran into a hot goalie,” was the sentiment many times last season. Or, last Monday night against Dwayne Roloson in Toronto’s loss to the Islanders.
“The power-play was awful.” If the refrain sounds familiar, it should. Toronto was worst in the league last year, and 1-for-16 in this three-game drought.
Turnovers, odd-man rushes against, and a fragile confidence that becomes unraveled at the first sign of adversity; these were signs that were evident in too many games last year, each of which resurfaced in last Saturday’s clunker in Philadelphia.
After a four-game winning streak, Leafs fans are falling off the bandwagon at 88 miles an hour.
Can the team stop playing like buttheads? Sure.
Tyler Bozak needs to stop playing like he’s got a George McFly “Kick Me” sign taped to his back in a school hallway. After being benched for most of the third period last Thursday against the Rangers, he fared only marginally better on Saturday, managing a shot on goal despite being held pointless. Perhaps the injection of Nikolai Kulemin on the Leafs top line along with Bozak and Phil Kessel will result in a higher production of offense.
The power-play doesn’t necessarily need an infusion of 1.21 gigawatts of electricity to make it more effective. In fact, the man-advantage unit comprised of Tomas Kaberle and Dion Phaneuf on the points plus Kulemin, Bozak and Kessel up front needs to simplify, instead of looking for the perfect tic-tac-toe play. The forwards have been guilty of overhandling the puck, much like bully Biff Tannen overhandles the older McFly’s eventual girlfriend and wife, Lorraine.
Most importantly, the psychological obstacle of helplessness after falling behind is what the Leafs need to overcome. In their first game against the Rangers, Toronto erupted for three quick second-period goals after going down 1-0. In the loss to the Islanders, they found a way to tie the game late in the third period, despite going on to lose in overtime.
But then, the Leafs never found their momentum after giving up two quick tallies in the Rangers rematch. Two nights later, Ron Wilson’s squad was absolutely deflated following Francois Beauchmin’s turnover to Mike Richards for the game’s opening goal.
Marty went back in time to instill self-confidence in his dad George, to defeat his antagonist Biff.
Unfortunately, the Leafs do not have the benefit of entertaining a visitor from 30 years into the future, nor is plutonium yet available in every corner drugstore.
The team has to believe that it can win.
No one is expecting them to travel all the way back to 1967.
Just a short trip to the first week of the season would be nice.
***
For the record, the Leafs hosted a game at Maple Leaf Gardens on October 26, 1985, the night that Marty McFly and Doc Brown took the DeLorean for that famous test drive at Twin Pines Mall. Toronto fell 7-5 to the Minnesota North Stars in the fifth game of what turned out to be a 9-game losing streak and eventual 13-game winless streak.
Rob Del Mundo is the author of Blue And White Beat, and is a regular columnist at TMLfans.ca
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