The pressure on Sheldon Keefe is rising: Monday Morning Leafs Report

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Mitch Marner has probably never been benched in his life.

It’s what made Sheldon Keefe’s decision to sit him down for about six minutes in the third period on Sunday night so stunning — and also indicative of the rising stakes for the Leafs and their head coach.

Benching one of the most important players on the team sends a very powerful message. It draws a clear line in the sand that errors, even “well-intentioned” errors, won’t be tolerated from anyone, even the top right winger in hockey and alternate captain who plays more minutes than just about anybody.

It’s also an incredibly risky decision that could backfire. Keefe risks losing the backing of one of his most important players at a time when he needs all the support he can get.

The benching comes less than two weeks after the Leafs coach critiqued the play of his top players in a loss to Arizona, criticism that Marner appeared most unhappy with. A meeting was needed to resolve things. Keefe later conceded that he could have phrased his criticism differently.

Now, more turmoil. And more pressure on the head coach to turn things around.

“I’m just gonna focus on what I can do here,” Keefe said when asked about his own job security after the loss to the Ducks, which saw his team blow a two-goal third-period lead. “I’ve got a job to do with the group. Our group has responded in the past. I thought we were responding well here today.”

It feels premature for job discussion talks. Another 10 games like this though and all bets are off.

Keefe’s tone seemed to change before the game. He seemed to lighten up. “Let’s just clear our heads and get out and play and do the things we know we can do,” he said of his message to the group before the game.

His stance had been a lot firmer, harsh even, before that.

During one point at training camp, Keefe halted practice and demanded more from the group. He stopped it again 20 seconds later when he didn’t see it and had the group do sprints. Not long after that, in the same on-ice session, Keefe implored the group to step up the physicality.

“You’ve got to be f—— physical,” he said.

Keefe blasted his team after they lost the regular-season opener to Montreal. Then came “Elite Players-Gate” five days later. Keefe has kept pushing and pushing. Hard. He halted practice in Vegas when he didn’t like what he was seeing. He got in the ear of Michael Bunting at one point when something was amiss.

Bunting didn’t look pleased.

Most worrisome is that his team has yet to respond to his prodding. Not after the first-week malaise. Not after the loss to the Golden Knights. Not after the loss to the Sharks when Keefe noted how well the top players for San Jose had played. And not after the sluggish loss to the Kings on Saturday.

Things were looking up briefly against the Ducks until they weren’t.

Keefe pushed too hard too soon, which may explain the change in his tune ahead of the game against Anaheim.

Then, of course, came the shocking Marner benching, the result of two turnovers that led to two goals for the Ducks. Keefe had been urging his team to take better care of the puck. He chose to make an example out of Marner.

It was a huge card to play — benching the star player. There are only so many times a coach can play a card like that, and Keefe has played plenty of them already in October alone.

“You just gotta know what’s going on in the game,” Keefe said of the Marner turnovers. “Everybody has to be responsible for their touch of the puck … Both were well-intentioned and everything like that — it’s just, they’re tough plays. We gotta manage those plays better. But we also have to have better support around (the puck) so if things go bad we’re in good spots.”

“I put a lot on my shoulders, put a lot of pressure on myself and I wasn’t happy with that second turnover especially,” Marner said of the O-zone giveaway that spurred the goal that brought the Ducks within one. “I want to make sure I’m doing better than that and helping this team win better than that.”

Lineup adjustments from the coach have yet to pay dividends. Usually a five-on-five juggernaut, the Leafs have been middle of the road so far instead. They’ve struggled to score goals. Their best players have yet to take off. Special teams have been hit or miss. The Leafs haven’t put together even one complete performance. More than that is how out of sorts they’ve looked most nights. Slow. Careless at times. And far from dangerous offensively.

As Keefe noted, his team responded to similar early-season turmoil last year. Fifteen wins in 17 games after starting 2-4-1.

“You’re just kinda waiting for it to come together,” he said. “And it comes together and all of a sudden, for the remainder of the season we were as good as any team in the league.”

It’s up to the head coach to spur that response again. His team is underachieving at the moment.

Five Points

1. Frustration: Marner and Auston Matthews voiced similar messages after the Ducks loss.

Said Matthews of how this start compares to last season: “It feels like the world’s crashing down on you and all this stuff … (E)verybody within expects a lot from each other and we have a standard that obviously we need to raise. And it starts within the group. It’s easy to look on the outside and read all the stuff that’s being written and all that stuff. But in the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is our belief in our group and inside the room and what we need to do to obviously turn it around.”

Marner was a tad fierier, noting that, “We started off a lot worse last year and everyone tried to put shambles in our brain. It’s not gonna happen with us.”

Of the rising heat around the team, he added: “For us, we’re blocking that out. We know we got that confidence in that room. We got the players in that room. It’s just making sure we stick with our programming, stick with our systems, and stuff’s gonna start falling for us. It hasn’t here recently. I think we just gotta play a little simpler sometimes, get pucks more to the net, just be more direct with it. I think sometimes we got a little too carried away, trying to look for too much of a pretty play.”

2. Top players: One big priority for Keefe right now: getting Marner, Matthews, William Nylander and John Tavares going.

Matthews has one five-on-five point all season. Tavares has yet to score a five-on-five goal through 10 games. Marner hasn’t been quite as electric as last season. Nylander has been hit or miss. (The Matthews line did look as good as they have all season early against the Ducks before petering out.)

Of their early struggles, Keefe said, “I think what happens is when you get early in a season you get a lot of offensive players that want to contribute and know that they can contribute, want to put up numbers, and know what their role is on the team. And (when) that’s not happening early in the season, all of a sudden you start to second-guess yourself and other areas of your game start to slip. You just gotta stop overthinking this thing and get out and move our feet, move the puck quickly, get to the net.”

Which sounds a lot like those remarks from Marner. Which suggests the players are at least hearing their coach.

3. Nylander at centre Pt. 1: Why is Nylander playing centre all of a sudden, amid continued lineup shuffling from Keefe?

The answer appears to be two-fold.

First, the Leafs need another centre.

Alex Kerfoot started the season as the fourth guy in line behind Matthews, Tavares and David Kampf. But as in previous seasons with Kerfoot at centre, “We decided to move away from that,” Keefe explained last week.

Calle Jarnkrok was up next. But it became clear, pretty quickly, that Jarnkrok may not be a viable option either. Jarnkrok played centre against the Sharks and Kings, and finished with a 31 percent expected goals mark.

The Leafs could play Pierre Engvall at centre, but that would keep him away from Kampf. And Kampf has played his best hockey as a Leaf with Engvall. So, Nylander.

4. Nylander at centre Pt. 2: Also: For the second year in a row, the Nylander-Tavares combination wasn’t working.

In fact, results between the two so far this season have been worse than last year, when Keefe eventually decided the two could no longer play together regularly.

Per 60 mins 2022-23 2021-22

Attempts

For

66.8

65.1

Against

64.5

53.1

Shots

For

36.5

36.1

Against

36.9

30.1

Expected goals

For

3.2

3.1

Against

3.2

2.3

Is Nylander a long-term option in the middle? Maybe. Maybe not. The Leafs should at least explore the possibility given the lack of viable options otherwise. It might give them a needed jolt of offence from lower in the lineup. To that point, Nylander set up a Denis Malgin goal in Anaheim.

Keefe can also send Nylander out for extra offensive zone faceoffs with Tavares-led units.

A Nylander-centred line does need major protection. Big-time stuffing in the offensive zone. Can they survive when they do end up playing defence? TBD. It’s possible that putting Nylander into the middle, where the demands are higher defensively, brings out a more determined effort from him at that end.

It’s presumably a lack of trust on that side of things that’s kept Nylander out of the middle in past spots when the Leafs were short a centre.

If not Nylander, or Kerfoot, or Jarnkrok, management will have to explore an outside alternative. They could give current Marlie Pontus Holmberg a try at some point too.

5. Up top: A positive for the Leafs and their power play: Matthews has made an adjustment that’s yielding him cleaner looks. You’ll notice him roaming more often at the top of the PP1 formation these days, just inside the blue line. There’s more room for him to operate there, more space to get that powerful shot off. “I feel like a lot of times I’m kinda just getting sat on,” Matthews said. “I think it’s important to get us moving around and giving some different looks to keep (the opponent) guessing a little bit more.”

Matthews scored his first power-play goal of the year from three-point land in San Jose last week:

He also fired a shot from deep that Tavares tipped home against Winnipeg:

You can see from his shooting map on the power play last season that he didn’t venture out there all that much.

Switching up locations makes a lot of sense with penalty kills doing all they can to ensure that he can’t rip it cleanly — aka “getting sat on.”

Bonus Point: Keefe has come up with one combination that’s working: Kampf and Engvall together again. Kampf’s expected goals percentage with the Swede: 64 percent. Add in Zach Aston-Reese, who had maybe his best game as a Leaf in Anaheim, and the Leafs have the makings of a useful bottom-six line.

Things I Think I Think

1. If the Leafs don’t end up winning the Atlantic and face another stiff first-round opponent next spring, remember October. In four games against a group of lower-class teams — Montreal, Arizona, San Jose and Anaheim — the Leafs collected just two of a possible eight points. That’s how you lose the division.

2. Giving Filip Kral his start in the NHL over the weekend backfired. It felt a little dicey to send Kral out for his first NHL games while the team was scuffling so much, particularly on defence. Kral’s inexperience showed especially in the Ducks game. He struggled with the puck, the pace, the size. He didn’t play a single shift in the third period.

Point of Curiosity

How will the Leafs respond now?

The schedule will do them no favours. The Leafs will get the Flyers on Wednesday. Then, a difficult weekend back-to-back against the Bruins (at home) and the Hurricanes (on the road). Then, the Golden Knights two nights later.

There were at least signs of improvement against the Ducks before the meltdown. Maybe the turning point is near …?

Last October, the Leafs were walloped 7-1 by the Penguins, then lost 4-1 to the Hurricanes in what Keefe believed was a turning point. Next game, his team fell behind 2-0 to Chicago at home before rallying back to win in OT. They kept winning from there.

Will history repeat itself?

(Top photo: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images)

Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and Evolving Hockey