Face Punches vs. Scoring Punch

The Toronto Maple Leafs practiced today, with new lines. Lupul-Bozak-Kessel is back together, Jake Gardiner may actually play, and a bit more shuffling went down too. But here’s something that bugs me.

Colton Orr appears to be in tomorrow’s lineup, skating on line three. Matt Frattin isn’t. This, at least in my eyes, is a terrible idea.

My initial evidence for this being bad goes to last season, when both of them were on the Toronto Marlies for their Calder Cup Finals run.

Lets talk about Frattin:

Now, lets talk about Orr:

So, what we see from a successful playoff team from just a year ago, is that Frattin is a viable option for offense and physical presence, while Colton Orr isn’t worth playing for half the games, and when he does, he contributes nothing offensively and barely fights.

After all, we’re talking about the playoffs; where fight frequency drops by over a third, and the fights that do happen go from “goon vs. goon agreed to at the draw” to “you just made my teammate bleed, you must pay”. So why do you need a staged fight based enforcer?

It would be one thing if the Leafs had nobody to step in for reactionary scraps. But guys like Mark Fraser, and if desperate, Dion Phaneuf, can do just that. Half this team has dropped the gloves when need be, so while it isn’t in their hopes, they can stand up for themselves in a time of need.

It would be one thing if Orr in any way intimidated the Bruins. But he doesn’t – they see no need to fight him. It doesn’t prove a point for them, and lets be honest, their fighters are all much more talented than he is, and recognize that the best favour they can do their team is not go to the box with him for five minutes. Will Orr’s presence stop Milan Lucic? No way. They could make for a good scrap, but Lucic isn’t dumb enough to swing back and leave his team without his hockey playing ability for five minutes while the Leafs put on an actual player.

The same goes for Shawn Thornton, Adam McQuaid, Gregory Campbell, Zdeno Chara, Nathan Horton, or the other tougher Bruins players. Intimidating the Boston Bruins by wanting to punch them in the face will not work. If you want to use physicality, hitting is more effective, and Frattin does that. But really, the only way to intimidate them is to take offensive control, and make Tuukka Rask feel the pressure. An enforcer doesn’t do that. A sharpshooter does. Matt Frattin fits that description much more than Colton Orr.

While toughness helped the Bruins win the Stanley Cup in 2011, it wasn’t toughness by goonery, rather toughness coming from already talented players. Which they had a lot of. Realistically, the biggest factor was having multiple lines capable of scoring goals, so they could capitalize on teams once they had to put out a weaker defensive pairing.

If there’s any “beat Boston at their own game” strategies to use, it’s that one. But as long as the Leafs are playing enforcers on their third line instead of trying to score, Randy Carlyle will remain confused as to why Zdeno Chara only goes out when Phil Kessel is on the ice, and why the Bruins don’t really care about who faces the bottom six.

I guess what I’m saying is; Frattin can give the Leafs another scoring option when the top six is being shut down. Orr skates around the ice getting rejected by potential fight opponents because there’s no benefit for them to face him. We have a glaring, recent case study of these two being in and out of a playoff lineup. But, at least for now, Randy Carlyle will ride the enforcers win championships mantra off into the sunset.