Complacency has no place with these Toronto Sceptres in PWHL playoffs

Article content

As good as Game 1 felt and with as many boxes as the Toronto Sceptres ticked for themselves in that 3-2 victory over the very familiar Minnesota Frost, satisfaction is just not a feeling they will allow themselves to have.

As many times as head coach Troy Ryan and his captain Blayre Turnbull mention how different this team is from the one that lost this series last year after building a 2-0 lead, those lessons from that playoff failure can’t be ignored and, to the Sceptres’ credit, aren’t being ignored.

The issues facing Toronto coming into Game 1 were a lack of 5-on-5 scoring for much of the regular season, a power play that was in a funk to end the year and an opponent that had a penchant for putting a team away early, an area the Sceptres haven’t been overly adapt at combatting.

In Game 1, all of those concerns were lessened.

Toronto outscored Minnesota 5-on-5 thanks to some determined work in the offensive zone, digging out pucks and creating opportunities that way.

The line of Turnbull, Hannah Miller and Jesse Compher led the way in that regard, creating the first goal off a battle won behind the net and then extending offensive zone time with some more determined play along the boards to the point that when Julia Gosling came on following a change, a fatigued and desperate Minnesota defender threw a puck up the middle that she easily picked off and walked in untouched, scoring off her own rebound.

It’s the kind of payoff that Ryan has been preaching all season. Do the work early and you’ll be rewarded. It won’t always be you benefitting individually, but the team will.

The power play was back to a more traditional approach eschewing the tendency of getting bogged down with looking for the pretty play in favour of quick shots and outnumbering and outworking your opponent in the dirty areas to achieve success.

Gosling’s second goal came on the power play and, while that was a cleaner goal on a nice drop pass from Miller, the majority of Toronto’s power-play chances came with traffic in front of Nicole Hensley and then quick and repeated shots into that condensed area.

That they didn’t score at all on a five-minute power play off the major assessed to Britta Curl-Salemme for a hit to the head of Toronto defender Renata Fast was a testament to Hensley, who stood on her head keeping the Toronto shooters at bay.

Post-game, Ryan purposefully kept his comments mostly positive, dipping into the negative only once really to say there are obviously a few things the team wants to clean up.

He called Toronto’s tentative start to the game — both teams really — strategic and, by that, we believe he means it was that way intentionally to prevent Minnesota getting off to its traditional fast start.

“I liked our game honestly right from start to finish,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t mean there weren’t little lulls or little downsides, but the game is not perfect. But I thought as a group, if you play 30 games like that in the regular season, you are going to have a ton of success. We played the way you have play to be successful in the playoffs and I liked that.”

Perhaps best of all, this team showed it is better equipped to deal with the momentum swings within a game that are such an important part of learning to play playoff hockey.

In the past, this team has waited until intermission to really face a switch in momentum and come up with a strategy to turn that momentum back in their favour.

Now this team addresses those things as they are happening, no longer waiting for the between-period talks to calm things down and regain control of the game’s flow.

“Instead of everybody feeling it and getting tense because they are feeling it individually, we just talk about it,” Ryan said. “On the bench we will bring it up. We can’t let one goal or one bad penalty or anything like that, you can’t let it sink you.

“They take care of it … so it doesn’t snowball.”

And that may be Toronto’s biggest takeaway from its first-round loss a year ago. They’re better equipped to handle those moments when the opponent has taken control.

This team knows they put together a good Game 1 to get a leg up in the series but they also know there’s more adversity waiting for them in the next game and they know they are capable of dealing with it.

mganter@postmedia.com