The injury bug has bitten the Toronto Maple Leafs on defense and there was some thought that the wealth might be spread out this time around in their game against the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday night.
Well, that wasn’t the way things shook out.
Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe essentially rolled with five defensemen against the Buffalo Sabres for most of the game. Max Lajoie — who made his season debut after injuries to Timothy Liljegren (ankle) and Jake McCabe (groin) — was limited to just 4:17 while Morgan Rielly logged a team-high 26:42.
That might explain Toronto’s lapse in defense, particularly in the third period where every Leafs’ tying goal was met with a quick response from the Sabres, leading to a 6-4 defeat on home ice on Saturday.
“The third period was the most exhausted I’ve seen a core of defense in my time in this league,” Keefe said. “We really just couldn’t get going. Couldn’t skate. Couldn’t make a pass. Couldn’t think. It was just too much for our team tonight.”
When pressed about what Keefe could do to change up the deployment or spread out the minutes, the head coach pointed to Lajoie being new to the group and a costly mistake.
“We did a rotation of five guys tonight and you got to use our sixth guy more for sure. Except it’s hard to do that when you put him on the ice and give a breakaway,” Keefe said.
Lajoie was on the ice and went to the wrong side after the Sabres got the puck back in their own zone. That led to an outlet pass and a goal from Jeff Skinner that made it 3-2 Sabres in the second period.
“You’ve got to earn trust when you come up. That’s part of it,” Keefe said of Lajoie and the deployment of the defense. “The other part is at times we have run though — out of necessity — run through five defensemen and we’ve handed that pretty well. Today it may have caught up to us.”
With two of Toronto’s top-six defensemen out and Conor Timmins out since training camp with a lower-body injury , the Leafs have increased the load of other defensemen like Rielly, who has averaged 26:56 over his last five games. Forty-year-old Mark Giordano logged a season-high 22:14.
“Everyone wants to play more so now it’s an opportunity for all of us to show what we got and, again, it’s more about collectively as a group, locking things down and focusing on keeping pucks out of our net,” Giordano said of his team’s play. “I just think once we do that the other stuff is going to come. Offensively, we’re a pretty gifted team, but you can’t give teams, especially a skilled team like that, you can’t give them looks like we did tonight.”
The Sabres had a 66 percent share of the expected goals, according to NaturalStatTrick.com
Help could be on the way as McCabe is a “possibility” to join practice on Sunday. The defenseman injured his groin on Oct. 26 in the Leafs’ 4-1 win against the Dallas Stars
And based on how the club played, he can’t return soon enough.