Ryan: How the Maple Leafs finally managed to get the better of the vaunted Bergeron Line

Mike Babcock had to take solace in the fact that Toronto was going to have some favorable matchups up front going into yet another first-round series with the Bruins. 

Adding a 47-goal scorer in John Tavares will do that for you, complimenting another top-six pivot in Auston Matthews and his 37 tallies on the season. However the matchups sorted themselves out, one of Babcock’s top-two centers were going to get their looks against whichever combination Bruce Cassidy was set to throw at them, while Toronto also had to like its chances with its third line of Nazem Kadri, Patrick Marleau and William Nylander.

Of course, there still remained the elephant in the room when it comes to toppling Boston — with the B’s top line of Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak once again poised to pick apart a porous Leafs defense.

The Bergeron line did most of the heavy lifting during Boston’s seven-game triumph over Toronto last spring, totaling an absurd 31 points along the way. But last year is last year, right?

Well, even with Bergeron missing a pair of regular-season matchups against Toronto in 2018-19, the B’s top line still toyed with whatever top-six combination Babcock employed in an effort to slow them down.

This year, it’s been Tavares and his line that have handled most of the matchups against Bergeron — with Boston holding the edge in shot attempts (27-20), shots on goal (13-7) and goals (1-0) during 22:33 of 5v5 TOI in which No. 37 and No. 91 were out on the ice together during the regular season.

At some point, you have to just shake your head if you’re Babcock, right? After all, that’s what most NHL bench bosses have done after dealing with a four-time Selke winner in Bergeron and his dynamic wingers.

But for Thursday’s Game 1 matchup at TD Garden — a bout that once again featured Bergeron and Tavares going head to head — Babcock pulled the trigger on a couple of in-game adjustments.

The result? A 4-1 Leafs win, and the first time in a very, very long time that Bergeron and Co. have looked mortal against their Original Six foe.



If you were to ask Marchand, he’d note Boston’s overall offensive deficiencies during Thursday’s 4-1 loss were due to self-inflected mistakes by way of poor puck management — and he has a point.

For most of the night, Bergeron and the rest of Boston’s forwards were often draining their energy recovering pucks or getting back to prevent odd-man rushes — not a conducive strategy when it comes to generating offense.

“I don’t think they took us off their game, I just don’t think we played our game,” Marchand said. “We weren’t playing the right way the whole way through and weren’t taking care of pucks the way we normally do and the way we can. That’s what they thrive on.”

But even when the Bergeron line managed to possess the puck and break it out of Boston’s zone, they didn’t get much luck down the other end of the sheet. The personnel up front for Babcock didn’t change from the regular season when it came to matching up against Bergeron. But on the blue line, the Leafs finally decided to throw in the towel.

For most of the last couple of seasons, Toronto has opted to keep it’s *cough* top pairing of Morgan Rielly and Ron Hainsey out on the ice whenever Bergeron and his line gets the call. The results have not been too pretty.

Rielly is a fantastic playmaker on the blue line and will likely earn some Norris votes this spring, but a shutdown defenseman, he is not. Hainsey, at the ripe age of 38, is not a top-pairing option. And over the last two seasons, Bergeron’s line has proven it — with Boston holding a plus-22 shot differential and scoring six goals during the 69:19 in which both units have been out at the same time.

But on Thursday, Toronto opted to roll with a new D pairing to handle Boston’s top line in Nikita Zaitsev and the Leafs’ mid-season addition, Jake Muzzin. And with a new option on the backline, the Maple Leafs began to beat Boston at its own game, denying clean zone entries at the blue line while Muzzin and Zaitsev took away time and space behind Toronto’s net and in the slot — two areas in which Marchand and Bergeron are at their best in the O zone.

“I think that’s the most physical we’ve seen that group this year,” Brandon Carlo said of Toronto’s defensive effort. “Their guys were stepping up on all of their lines even their more skilled guys in kind of putting bodies on us. I don’t think we put it back in their faces as much. That’s a good learning experience in Game 1 to go with the rest of the series.”

With the Zaitsev-Muzzin pairing adding a heavier presence during the Bergeron line’s shifts, the Bruins’ cheat code when it comes to instant offense found itself neutralized.

By the end of Thursday night, Bergeron had logged a little under 11 minutes of 5v5 TOI against the Tavares line and the Muzzin-Zaitsev pairing. During the 11:22 of ice time in which Bergeron skated against Marner, Boston was on the wrong side of shot attempts (11-7), shots on goal (7-2) and, most importantly, goals scored (1-0).

“We just wanted to stay above them all night, we wanted to make it hard on them to get to our line and get it in,” Marner said of accounting for the Bergeron line. “Muzzin and Zaitsev did a great job as well, stopped them at the line a lot of times, stopped their rushes. For us four just making sure we're trying to play as hard as we can down in their zone, make it hard to get out, when they do get out we’re fully fresh.”

With the Bruins remaining on home ice for Game 2 Saturday night, Boston still has the luxury of dictating matchups by way of last change. After dominating the Matthews line so thoroughly last season, Cassidy might want to stick his big guns back with that matchup, although the emergence of Zaitsev and Muzzin as a physical counter very well could loom large for the rest of the series.