Depth, not star power, leads Maple Leafs to Game 3 win over Lightning

Two of the most talent-rich hockey teams on the planet met for Game 3 of their first-round playoff matchup Friday night at Amalie Arena.

So, naturally, it was Ilya Lyubushkin delivering the night’s first highlight-reel moment. He’s the guy the fans pay to watch, right?

Seriously, though. Coming out of the penalty box to start a 3-on-2 rush for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the rugged stay-at-home defenseman did a convincing Cale Makar impression. Lyubushkin deftly stickhandled into the Tampa Bay Lightning zone, held the puck long enough to make goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy think about a shot and whipped a cross-ice pass to Colin Blackwell, who fired the puck into a yawning cage to put the Leafs up 2-0.

Midway through the second period, Leafs supersta—oops, scratch that. It was checking center David Kampf’s turn to deliver a signature offensive moment this time. He threaded a perfectly placed wrist shot under Vasilevskiy’s right arm to score for the second time in the series. The play that started his scoring chance? A thunderous hit by Lyubushkin on Lightning left winger Brandon Hagel.

The Leafs weathered a non-stop onslaught from the Lightning in the third period after they pushed back from 3-0 to make the score 3-2. Coming through in the key moments: Toronto’s third-liners. Ilya Mikheyev broke up a scoring chance at the end of a Tampa power play and turned it into a breakaway. In the waning minutes of the third period, he and Pierre Engvall helped clear Toronto’s zone and converge on a Mikheyev empty netter before Mikheyev added a second empty-netter. The bottom of the Leafs lineup came through time and again.

“It was a great game for us, a great team effort, all guys, all lines,” Kampf told reporters after Game 3.

So the Leafs marched into the defending champs’ home building and won Game 3 not on the strength of their many stars, from Auston Matthews to Mitch Marner to John Tavares, but thanks to a characteristic they badly lacked in recent playoff runs: depth.

The 2021-22 Leafs were deep enough to insert Jason Spezza at forward and Justin Holl on defense for Game 3 not as injury replacements, but because coach Sheldon Keefe felt like it. They had Timothy Liljegren and Rasmus Sandin available on defense and Wayne Simmonds and Kyle Clifford scratched at forward. Last season, Holl was a top-four defenseman on this team. Spezza, who sat for Games 1 and 2 of this series, dressed for every playoff game in the previous two Leaf runs.

Leafs GM Kyle Dubas lost left winger Zach Hyman last offseason to free agency and didn’t replace him with a big-ticket signing but chose to deepen the roster instead. He signed Kampf, Michael Bunting and Ondrej Kase for the forward group. Dubas whiffed on the Nick Ritchie signing but turned him into Lyubushkin via mid-season trade. Dubas added Blackwell and defenseman Mark Giordano at the trade deadline. All those relatively modest moves have created a synergy that makes the Leafs a better team from the top of the lineup to the bottom.

How important was the bottom of the lineup in Game 3? With Lightning coach Jon Cooper having last change for the first time in the series, he glued his shutdown/skill hybrid line of Alex Killorn, Anthony Cirelli and Brayden Point to the Bunting-Matthews-Marner line, and the results were astonishing. In 5-on-5 play, the Leafs’ top line was outchanced 8-1, outshot 5-1 and managed three shot attempts versus 12 against.

That made it all the more important for different members of the Leafs to step up, and they did just that.

“Getting those two goals from Blackwell and ‘Kamper’ were huge for us,” Matthews told reporters. “I thought they all played extremely well, especially Kamper’s line tonight. They ate up a lot of really good minutes against their top line. I think that’s what the playoffs bring out and what they’re all about. The teams that succeed always have those kinds of guys.”

For a good example of how much depth matters for deep playoff runs, all the Leafs had to do is stare at their own opponents. The Lightning are famous for developing seemingly marginal prospects into crucial contributors, from the since-departed Tyler Johnson and Yanni Gourde to Tampa’s Game 3 goal-scorers: Ross Colton, who broke out for 22 goals this season and buried a laser of a one-timer on the power play for Tampa’s first goal, to Ondrej Palat, whose seeing-eye wrist shot found the back of the net early in the third period.

The Lightning have provided the blueprint for how to win in the postseason. Maybe the Leafs have learned from that. It’s a big reason why they now hold a 2-1 series lead. So is goaltender Jack Campbell, who stopped 32 of 34 shots and was Vasilevskiy’s equal or better in crucial moments Friday night, particularly during the third-period blitz.

As Keefe said postgame Friday, “We’re trying to be a team that wins these games and finds a way to win them.” So far, they’re doing just that. But the work is not done, of course. Friday’s win marked the fourth time in the Matthews/Marner era that the Leafs have held a 2-1 series lead. They’ve yet to win one over that span.

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Depth, not star power, leads Maple Leafs to Game 3 win over Lightning

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