TORONTO — Frederik Andersen’s night ended after 46 minutes. His Toronto Maple Leafs teammates weren’t quite so fortunate.
They had to endure a full 60-minute beatdown from the Tampa Bay Lightning here Thursday after seeing seven shots get past Andersen before the midway point of the third period.
That resulted in a rare pull for the Leafs No. 1 goaltender — only the third time he’s been replaced by a backup due to performance since March 2018. He was far from the only player in Leafs colours to have an off-night against a division rival, but took ownership for his role in the 7-3 defeat.
"When you make mistakes out there you’ve got to pay for it," said Andersen. "Obviously I wasn’t up to speed today and, yeah, I paid for it."
It was a rough performance from start to finish.
Not only did Andersen surrender four first-period goals for just the second time in his NHL career — the other came in Game 4 of the 2017 playoffs against Washington — he was victimized by a bad bounce and his own bad decision before giving way to Michael Hutchinson.
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With the Leafs trailing 5-3 and the game still in reach, he saw a Tampa dump-in hit referee Marc Joannette and end up directly on Ondrej Palat’s sitck. The Lightning winger fired the puck towards the crease and saw it bank in off Kasperi Kapanen’s skate.
Then, three minutes later, Andersen played a clearing attempt directly to Steven Stamkos, who promptly found Nikita Kucherov for the light’s-out finish before Andersen could get back in position and set.
"Definitely could have played some of the situations differently," he said. "They’re a good team down there, too, so when you do make mistakes they usually capitalize pretty often on it."
Andersen has made 196 appearances for the Leafs and that was just the second time he’d allowed as many as seven goals in a game. Tampa also put a seven spot on him Oct. 25, 2016 — which is notable for a couple reasons.
First, the Lightning have had his number.
He’s 3-8-1 against them with an .882 save percentage since joining the Leafs.
October has also proven to be a consistently difficult month on the 30-year-old, which probably speaks as much to the loose hockey being played as anything else. Still, it’s been an area of emphasis for the steady Dane who typically produces a season-long performance you can set your watch to — with save percentages of .917, .918, .918 and .919 the last four years.
"He’s such a quality goaltender — one of the best in the world — and we just did not make it easy for him tonight against those type of shooters," said captain John Tavares. "We have to do a lot better job at defending. I think letting seven in at home is just unacceptable."
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There was a clear sense of disappointment in the Leafs dressing room after dropping a third-straight game on home ice. They picked up a point in Saturday’s 6-5 loss to Montreal and played well against the St. Louis Blues in a 3-2 defeat Monday that could have gone either way.
By comparison, this one wasn’t even close.
"It seemed like every loose puck was kind of theirs and they just kept coming after us wave after wave," said Auston Matthews, who scored his team-best sixth goal of the season.
"We didn’t execute at a high enough level, we didn’t play right, and they were better than us – they won all the 50/50s, all the loose puck battles," said head coach Mike Babcock. "We took three penalties in the first [period] and I thought that got us out of sync. It wasn’t a very good night for us.
"I thought it was going to be a hell of a game and I didn’t think it was."
Making matters worse was the fact the goaltender wasn’t there to bail them out, as he so often is.
The Leafs are an offence-first team that asks a lot from Andersen. They are known to spring the odd leak. Against the Lightning, they gave up nine high-danger chances against, according to naturalstattrick.com — the most they’ve allowed in any of the five games played this season.
"We weren’t really too helpful for him on a lot of those goals," said Matthews. "I mean backdoors, tap-ins, power plays. It’s not necessarily all on him. We’ve got to be better in front of him, just be better as a five-man unit and be better on the penalty kill."
Andersen has shown that he can be better, too.
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October 11, 2019 at 11:08AM
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