DENVER—Calvin Pickard could not have imagined a worse debut as a Maple Leaf.
A worse single moment, a worse Exhibit X first goal surrendered. Against the team with which he’d made all of his previous 86 NHL appearances over a three-year span.
Fate strikes meanly.
Blame Auston. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
It was Matthews’ turnover at the Colorado blue line — had his stick lifted right off the puck — that resulted in a seemingly harmless dump-in by Gabriel Landeskog: bouncy-bouncy-bouncing towards the Leaf net.
Too harsh, perhaps, to accuse Pickard of misplaying the puck — it bouncy-bouncy-bounced right off him and rebounded into the low slot, where a streaking Nathan MacKinnon had arrived first, behind the Toronto defence. Bounce and pounce and just like that MacKinnon had surpassed his entire goal output from last season, 16th for 2017-18, Leafs down 1-0 at the Pepsi Center scarcely halfway through the first period and with just one shot on the board for the visitors.
And you know what else? It wasn’t even the ugliest goal of that opening frame.
Ugly would be the recurring theme in Toronto’s 4-3 overtime loss, mostly stinking to Mile High Heaven through 40 minutes yet salvaging one valuable point through 63.25.
And in the end, it wasn’t primarily down to Pickard either. A collapsing defence did him wrong on a pair of Avalanche goals while the Leafs’ high-octane offence went mostly pffft, not even a squeak out of the big guns — until coach Mike Babcock pulled the aforementioned Pickard for an extra attacker with under two minutes left in regulation time and James van Riemsdyk, an immovable object just off the Colorado crease, backhand-tipped in a Morgan Rielly shot from the point that had been blocked before it could get to the net.
That sent the teams into OT, seventh time the Leafs have been dragged that far, with a 6-1 record.
This time, less than two minutes in, Connor Brown got tagged for hauling down MacKinnon and, after staving off a pepper-assault from the Avalanche — plus a shot that rattled off the crossbar — Pickard was beaten on a wrister from the slot by J.T. Compher, at 3:25.
They deserved the W, frankly, none more so than the smoking hot MacKinnon, biggest difference maker with a goal and two assists, and luring Brown into that interference misdemeanor.
“It was a good goal to come back and get the tie,” said Babcock, “but I thought we had lots of opportunities before that (in the third). I’m disappointed about going short-handed in overtime, especially with the amount of calls that could have been made and that one that shouldn’t have been made.”
Ron Hainsey, understating: “It wasn’t pretty, certainly at the start. Grind it out. We got out of that first period, same thing in the second. Huge goal by James to get us a point.”
Most homely goal of the encounter however — or the quintessential fourth-line contribution if looked at from that perspective — was rewarded, and we do mean rewarded, to Matt Martin.
Martin from Josh Leivo and Roman Polak. Go ahead, try to conceive of a more unlikely tic-tac-toe scoring sequence. Martin behind the net doing spadework, basically tossing the puck out front to Dominic Moore, who’d been ridden into the crease by Blake Comeau. The shoveling pass clanked off Comeau’s skate and over Semyon Varlamov’s shoulder.
Technically that was recorded as Toronto’s second shot of the game. Except there was no shot. But the Leafs gladly took the goal, fortunate to come out of the first period knotted 1-1, outshot 7-6.
So much for starting on time. So much for easing poor Pickard into his emergency call-up netminding duties with Toronto, this former Colorado second-round draft pick, nee Winnipeg, bat-of-an-eyelash Vegas Golden Knight, acquired by Toronto on Oct. 6 for prospect Tobias Lindberg and a 2018 sixth-round pick. Toiling these past few months as a Marlie. But the healthiest and apparently most attractive option for the Leafs after No. 2 goalie Curtis McElhinney went down lame — lower-body injury — during the Thursday morning skate back in Phoenix.
“Whenever you’ve got a guy in there that’s new to the team, first start, whatever, you want to play well for him,” Rielly had said pre-game of Pickard, a teammate on the Canadian squad that won world championship gold in 2016. “Make life a little bit easier for him, especially early.”
Pickard had actually preceded the team to Denver after receiving the summons early Thursday. Was out on the ice — familiar surroundings, after all — by himself Friday morning. Certainly appeared psychologically prepped for his engagement, even receiving a nice welcome-back ovation from the crowd before puck drop.
“I’m friends with a lot of the guys over there and it’s my first NHL game this season, so it’s pretty unique,” said Pickard, facing a thick post-game media scrum, and it’s been a while since he’d done that. “I just had to channel those emotions. It was tough to lose in overtime, but a well-earned point tonight.”
He further described the whirlwind of the previous 24 hours.
“Went for breakfast with a couple of my teammates from the American league and then got back to my place and got the call. Headed over to grab my gear, went to the airport, couple flights and got here, got some rest. Familiar territory being in this building, so that was nice. It was pretty crazy, for sure.”
Back-to-backs — eighth of 14 such sets for the Leafs — and Babcock was not going to tap Freddie Andersen for a second start inside 24 hours, not with the team amidst a three-games-in-four-nights road trip, headed next for a New Year’s Eve tilt in Vegas.
“It’s an opportunity for him,” observed Babcock of Pickard back between big-league pipes. “I imagine it’s something he’d embrace. It’s an opportunity for us to watch him as well. We’ve just got to do a good job of playing in front of him.”
And afterwards: “He gave us a chance. That’s all you can ask for.”
These are the bottom-trolling Central Division Avalanche. But the Leafs have a tendency of coming up flat against low-brow opposition. Though, to be fair, acclimating immediately to the Denver altitude might have explained why the visitors started so meekly, no jump in their stride, no vim in their attack.
“You’ve got to keep your shifts short,” Tyler Bozak, who actually lives in Denver in the off-season, had advised. “Obviously you’re going to be a little out of breath but it’s not a huge deal, I think. If you get caught out there for a long shift, it’ll really hit you. But keep the shifts short, roll the lines and keep it simple.”
Sound advice, though Toronto was rolling those lines without Nazem Kadri, still feeling the effects of a Coyote elbow in the ear from the previous evening. So, Leivo drew in, assigned to the fourth line, and Brown — who in no way should be on the fourth line — matriculated to a unit with Leo Komarov, centred by Patrick Marleau.
Kadri, said Babcock, should be good to go in Sin City. The imminent availability of McElhinney, he wasn’t too sure.
Keep in mind that the Leafs are also in the middle — close to the end, actually — of a nine-game stretch in which eight are on the road, albeit that lengthy absence from the Air Canada Centre bracketed around the mandated three-day Christmas break.
But while they’d been electric in Arizona the night before, flashing piston-pumping speed and goal-scoring prowess in the 7-4 win, they more closely resembled exhausted stumblebums for long chunks of the Friday encounter.
It was the spear-carriers, not the tiffany gems, who shouldered the load for Toronto — until JVR struck in the short strokes — if without much esthetic quality.
As uglies go, Polak caught a further piece of that action in the second period — ugly as in the goal, not Polak, to be clear — after Mikko Rantanen had nudged the home side ahead 2-1. The leaden-footed Polak, something of a coach’s pet on the Toronto back end — and the Leafs grateful for his presence especially with the continuing injury absence of blue-line workhorse Nikita Zaitsev (suspected broken foot) — pulled Toronto 2-2 square at 14:04 of the second, finding (accidentally, it was a centring attempt) a sliver of space between a cheating-for-the-pass Varlamov’s left toe and the left post. Followed by the slowest, limpest celebratory fist pump in memory and Polak savoured his second goal of the season.
Toronto fell behind for a third time in the third period, on a hashmarks-to-hashmarks passing sequence, MacKinnon to Alexander Kerfoot at 4:34.
Marvelled Pickard of ex-teammate MacKinnon: “He’s an absolutely stud right now, for sure. He’s found a new gear this season and you saw it out there tonight. So credit to him. He’s feeling it and it’s good to see him doing well — just not against us.”
Still, the Leafs battled back, got to give them that much. And took a point the hard way.