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With the play-in round of the 24-team playoff Stanley Cup Playoffs just over two weeks away, the focus of each of the 16 teams involved immediately turned to their opponent for the play-in round. The Toronto Maple Leafs will face the ninth-placed Columbus Blue Jackets in a best-of-five series, which is a match between clubs with contrasting styles.
Toronto looks to have a slight advantage in goal with Frederik Andersen over the Blue Jackets tandem of Joonas Korpisalo and Elvis Merzlikins, but the story is a quite different on defense, where the Blue Jackets are better with All-Stars Seth Jones, Zach Werenski and veterans David Savard and Ryan Murray over a Leafs group of Morgan Rielly, Jake Muzzin, Tyson Barrie and Cody Ceci that has been plagued by injuries and inconsistency.
The difference between victory and defeat may come down to coaching and in this series the experience of John Tortorella would appear to give Columbus an advantage over Leafs rookie head coach Sheldon Keefe. Keefe played under Tortorella in Tampa Bay for all 125 games of his NHL career and learned lessons that would help him in future career as a bench boss and that familiarity might help Toronto in their playoff matchup.
"(I've) been fortunate to reconnect (with Tortorella) over the last few years. Mainly the relationship has been through text messages and sharing messages back and forth, and got a nice note from him when I got promoted with the Leafs. I feel very grateful for that." Keefe said on Thursday. “(As I) started to work towards being a career coach, (I) became a big fan of learning through coaches and having the experience as a player with him is something that I've always been able to watch from a distance and I feel like I've had a pretty good sense of his messaging and his methodology.…
Tortorella has a Stanley Cup victory, two Jack Adams Awards (2004, 2017), led the Jackets to a stunning first-round upset over the Lightning last season(in which he outwitted Tampa coach John Cooper) and is the favorite for a third Adams after getting injury-riddled and offensively challenged Columbus club into a playoff spot with a 33-22-15 record, while Keefe took over for Mike Babcock in late November and brought the Leafs back from a slow start to a playoff spot with a 27-15-5 record.
"Playing for him as a young guy was difficult. You made it tough to have to earn your way as a young player and I was caught up in that. As I made the transition from playing to being a coach, you try to start to think about what you value and what you're going to do and how you're going to put together your program, that's when you really learn to respect the process of how you put together a team concept." Keefe said.
"Just the respect that you get, especially as you look back on it as a player. I didn't get to play on that Stanley Cup championship team in Tampa, but I was there through the process of that team growing from one year to the next, eventually to the point that it was too good for me to play on, but I was there for that process and just seeing how we put all that together, to eventually build it to a champion is something that frankly has really been the foundation of my coaching."
While familiarity will give Keefe some insight into how to combat Tortorella’s tactics, the Jackets will benefit from having a nearly healthy roster (as opposed to how they were when the season was paused in mid-March) and the confidence that playing his tight defensive-minded style (as they did in upsetting Tampa) can result in victory.
The Leafs will need to fight through the Blue Jackets attempts to neutralize their high-powered offense, while at the same time play more sound in their own end (which has been the focus of their on-ice work at training camp).
Advantage – Columbus
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