Leafs defenseman discusses having to play forward to close out the regular season
The Leafs finished off the regular season on a 4-game win streak, which should bode well for their confidence level heading into Tuesday's playoff series opener against the Tampa Bay Lightning. One of the storylines from the end of the season was the Leafs dressing defenseman Conor Timmins as a forward against Tampa and New York in the final two games. Timmins spoke about the assignment this week, admitting that he was panicking and nervous about it and that there were some pretty big adjustments.
A lot of players, when they're first starting out, play a variety of positions before they end up carving out a niche in a certain spot. However, for Timmins, he has been a defenseman from the second he put on skates onward, so there wasn't a lot of previous history there to draw from, hence the nerves. He has good offensive instincts from the blueline, but playing forward is a whole different animal. Timmins himself even admitted to playing far more defensively than his linemates, not taking any unnecessary risk.
"I was definitely F3 most of the game. It's kind of nerve-racking when you have two guys behind you even though it's just a 2-on-2, so I was trying to stay high a lot," Timmins said with a smile when asked about his first couple of games playing forward.
As far as what the biggest adjustment was for Timmins, he revealed that it was all of the extra skating that made things challenging.
"Just the skating and how much you're just going the whole shift. It just seems like the play's happening all around you, and you're just sprinting from one spot to another. On defence, a lot of the time you're kind of gliding up the ice and reading the play in front of you," Timmins revealed.
Timmins played just 8:29 and 7:47 of ice time in his 2 games at forward, but I'm sure if you asked him, he'd tell you he was glad just to be playing at all at that point of the season. With 8 defensemen ahead of him on the blueline depth chart, it was either jump in at forward or sit in the press box. Seems like a pretty easy decision to me.
