Sheldon Keefe reveals something wild that he considered in Boston when he was down to four Dmen
Tuesday evening's win in Boston was a big one for the Leafs against a tough division rival with whom they're in a tight race in the Atlantic. The game against the Bruins, not unlike the one against Florida on Sunday, had a playoff-like feel to it. The good news? The Leafs won both games. The bad news? They didn't come out of Tuesday's game unphased.
During the contest, goaltender Petr Mrazek appeared to injure his groin stretching out to make a save and just like that, he was done for the night, forcing rookie Erik Kallgren to enter the game in his place. In addition, defenseman Justin Holl, who had just shed his full visor, took a puck to the face/head in front of the Leafs' net, left the game bloodied and, like Mrazek, did not return.
As if those two losses weren't bad enough for the Leafs, Bruins forward Taylor Hall delivered a blindside sucker punch to the side of the head of defenseman Ilya Lyubushkin, who needed assistance to make it off the ice and back to the Leafs' locker room.
With the Leafs down a goaltender and two defensemen, the bench was significantly shorter - especially on the defensive side of things. The Leafs played a large portion of the game with just four defensemen in Morgan Rielly, T.J. Brodie, Mark Giordano and Timothy Liljegren, but head coach Sheldon Keefe revealed during the post game media scrum that he had considered some desperate measures.
Keefe said in his media availability that he contemplated using a pair of forwards as defensemen to get back up to six blueliners. If he had done that, it's very likely that shutdown center David Kampf would have been one of the players selected, due to his defensive acumen. A lot of people assume that Mitch Marner may have been another, but I'm not so sure.
Personally, I think the Leafs would have used Colin Blackwell as the other forward who played some defensive minutes. Not unlike Kampf, Blackwell plays a sound defensive game, and unlike Marner, plugging Blackwell in that hole on the blueline wouldn't create another gaping hole up front.
In the end, Keefe and his coaching staff just decided to run with four blueliners, and each of them saw a sharp increase in ice time, obviously. Brodie led the way with over 26 minutes, with Rielly not far behind at 25:30. Giordano was next in line with a little under 23 minutes and Liljegren landed right around the 21-minute mark.
| POLL | ||
MARS 30 | 290 ANSWERS Sheldon Keefe reveals something wild that he considered in Boston when he was down to four Dmen Should Keefe have used multiple forwards as defensemen instead of rolling only four blueliners? | ||
| No | 131 | 45.2 % |
| Yes | 69 | 23.8 % |
| Don't care, they got the win! | 90 | 31 % |
| List of polls | ||
