It took only seven games for the Toronto Maple Leafs coaching staff to change course and ditch their original plans on defence.
The personnel would stay the same (for a little while anyway). The pairs would be different.
The change was made late in the first period of an Oct. 24 game against the St. Louis Blues. The one that stuck, and looks like a potential stroke of mastery, was Chris Tanev unexpectedly joining forces with Jake McCabe.
A defensive monster has emerged. They’ve been one of the stingiest pairings in the league so far this season.
Throughout their 10 full games together, Tanev and McCabe have logged almost 140 minutes at five-on-five. The Leafs have given up a total of two goals in those minutes, the second of which came during a relatively off night for the duo in Washington on Wednesday.
The Leafs are yielding a minuscule 1.5 expected goals per 60 minutes in the McCabe-Tanev minutes, the third-stingiest mark for any highly used pair (min. 120 minutes) in the league over that stretch.
The twosome boasts an expected goals mark of 58 percent in that time.
Those numbers are all the more impressive when you factor in the pairing’s nightly diet of top lines and a whole whack of defensive zone faceoffs. Tanev and McCabe have an offensive zone faceoff percentage of just 28 percent over those 10 games, easily the lowest among the aforementioned group of league-wide pairings.
In other words, this isn’t some sheltered third pairing. It’s just the opposite. This pair is getting buried against the stiffest competition and is not just winning its minutes — it’s dominating its minutes.
The partnership extends to the penalty kill, where McCabe and Tanev have played together all season on the Leafs’ first unit. Looking for one reason for the team’s improved PK this season, ranked sixth in the league at almost 85 percent? Look no further than the McCabe-Tanev duo: The Leafs have surrendered three power-play goals, total, in their nearly 49 minutes.
Among high-usage duos, only the Carolina Hurricanes’ pair of Jaccob Slavin and Brent Burns has been tougher to score against.
“I think we complement each other,” Tanev said of McCabe. “I’ve played against him a ton. I know how much of a competitor he is, how hard he works, really good skater. When you have someone like that, it’s usually pretty easy to play with (them).”
Tanev saw similarities between McCabe and his long-time partner in Calgary, Noah Hanifin.
“Hanny might be a bit more offensive-minded,” Tanev said, “but similar sort of build — strong, good skaters, both excellent players.”
Tanev and McCabe both excel at killing plays quickly in their own zone, keeping the front of the net clear and blocking a lot of shots.
Both are also sneaky good at moving the puck out of their own zone, especially with McCabe now back on his strong side.
Tanev is the real uplifting presence. He’s been good, maybe even better than advertised, as a defensive stopper in Year 1 of his six-year contract with the Leafs. He owns the second-best expected goals mark of any Leaf this season (a hair behind Auston Matthews), even with that particularly prickly usage.
Tanev has blocked a league-leading 58 shots.
The Leafs first put Tanev and McCabe together two nights after they were pelted for six goals and embarrassed in a loss to Columbus. Until that point, the primary top-line assignment had been going, ever so slightly, to McCabe and Oliver Ekman-Larsson.
It wasn’t going well. While Tanev and Morgan Rielly were thriving together, the Leafs were just hanging on in the Ekman-Larsson-McCabe minutes, winning about 50 percent of the expected goals.
The number of expected goals against per 60 minutes: 3.2, one of the worst numbers in the league among pairings that have seen at least 80 five-on-five minutes. The numbers were even worse, more worryingly, when the pairing saw the ice with the Leafs’ No. 1 line of Matthews, Mitch Marner and Matthew Knies.
Ekman-Larsson and McCabe were beaten for two goals by the Columbus Blue Jackets in what proved to be their final game together on Oct. 22, both in transition.
It felt like the Leafs were asking too much of Ekman-Larsson at age 33. Though he performed well last season in Florida, he did so mostly on the Panthers’ third pair.
The revamped alignment got Tanev and McCabe, the Leafs’ two best and gruffest defenders, focused exclusively on shutting down the opposition’s most dangerous players. Mike van Ryn, who runs the Leaf defence, has been able to target their usage that way.
The Rielly-Ekman-Larsson combo didn’t work nearly as well.
Even while getting stuffed in the offensive zone (65 percent offensive zone faceoffs percentage) over nine full games together, the Leafs lost the shot-attempt battle badly (39 percent) as well as the scoring-chance fight (43 percent) and expected-goals struggle (45 percent) in their minutes.
Which explains why Craig Berube decided to break the duo up in Jani Hakanpää’s return to the lineup on Wednesday night.
Berube teamed Hakanpää up with Rielly and sent Ekman-Larsson to the third pairing. Though it remains to be seen if Hakanpää can hold up physically, not to mention get around the ice well enough to be effective, it’s worth noting Rielly has thrived with Hakanpää types in the past, including Ilya Lyubushkin (again) last season. Ekman-Larsson, meanwhile, returns to more suitable duty lower in the lineup.
The one pair that didn’t change, and won’t if they keep shutting players down: McCabe and Tanev.
— Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick and Evolving Hockey
(Photo of Chris Tanev: Dan Hamilton / Imagn Images)
