After weeks of a seemingly never-ending nightmare, the Toronto Maple Leafs got their mojo back on the power play during Tuesday night’s win over the Boston Bruins.
On a night when Auston Matthews was unavailable due to an upper-body injury, the Leafs exploded for three goals on the man advantage on seven attempts for a roughly 42.3% success rate. The area of their special teams had been their Achilles heel through the first month of the season and was one of the reasons why they got out of the gate inconsistently. They may have had their close calls before Tuesday night, but more often than not came up empty, leading to their power play sitting near the bottom of the league.
One key reason for their success against the Bruins was having Matthew Knies parked in front of the net, creating havoc. His presence in the crease directly led to all three goals, regardless of whether or not he got a point on the play.
“I think it gives you confidence and I think it, you know, allows you to try to focus on that more,” Morgan Rielly said before Friday’s morning skate on how having Knies on the top unit helps give him the willingness to fire shots from the point. “Obviously Knisey did a great in front on that goal and the other two. When you have one of your top guys not available, you kind of have to re-focus and we talked about what we can do with what we have in terms of what we can make work. Getting traffic and trying to get pucks through is an easy way to kind of simplify.”
The goal that Rielly was referring to was his tally in the second period that opened the scoring. His shot from the point was able to get past Jeremy Swayman because Knies blocked his view of the puck which turned an otherwise low-percentage shot into a goal.
What power play struggles? 🤷♂️
Morgan Rielly opens the scoring for Toronto pic.twitter.com/Mqrf23foA3
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) November 6, 2024
This strategy of Knies parked in front of the crease and creating chaos helped result in the other two goals, all while their captain was on the sidelines. Reilly thinks the absence of Matthews doesn’t force them to deviate from their plans but is just a case of the rest of the team stepping up.
“I don’t think it changes anything,” he said. “You don’t have your top guy, you have to step up. Everyone has to be a bit more crisp and everyone has to be a bit more on. You want to be able to achieve that when everyone’s in and you want to have that high level of execution. I think we’ve had that in time with everyone in; but with him out, guys have to step up.”
“Do you change your plan? Yeah, a little bit because he is kind of the focus of it. But I don’t think that is a reflection of the results or whatever, that’s just a different mentality.”
Matthews was not on the ice at Thursday’s practice and did not attend Friday’s morning skate, meaning he is likely to not be available for the game against the Detroit Red Wings. If the Leafs want to keep up their renewed success on the man advantage, they will once again have to do it without their captain in the lineup.
Oliver Ekman-Larsson felt that the team finally getting some momentum on the power play was inevitable, regardless of whether or not Matthews would be in the lineup when that occurred.
“I think it was just about time to start scoring on the powerplay,” he said. “Obviously we have been struggling a little bit and trying to do something that might not be there. So it was nice to see the powerplay score some big goals for us. Like I said, I think it was a matter of time. We’ve been working on it. Sometimes it’s clicking right away, sometimes it takes a little bit longer. We have unbelievable players that can play on the power play, so I’m not really worried about that.”
