When practice concluded after 30 minutes on Sunday afternoon, Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe went straight to centre ice and took a knee beside the team’s oldest defender.
Keefe spoke to Jake Muzzin, a Stanley Cup winner and veteran of nearly 700 NHL games, for only a couple minutes. And while Keefe didn’t say outright what exactly the two of them discussed (he wasn’t asked directly), you got a pretty good sense of what the message may have been when Muzzin came up afterward.
“Jake’s a guy that when we’re not playing well as a team, when we’re not defending well as a team,” Keefe explained, “he takes on a lot of that himself, and at times I think is doing a little bit too much and is getting caught with that.”
Keefe was unhappy with how the Leafs defended in a loss to the Blues. Too many “gifts.” He was especially displeased with the rush stuff St. Louis generated. More “connected” play, he said, would “help a guy like Muzz just do his job.”
“And when he’s focused on just that, he does it well,” Keefe said. “Right now in the season, in the way that things have gone defensively, especially of late, he’s taking on a lot of that himself. And that’s not good for anybody.”
With more than half the season in the books and the trade deadline only four weeks away, the Leafs’ defence feels rather uncertain.
