What Babcock will probably do versus Boston’s best line

It’s approaching game one, and everyone is starting to talk about what the Leafs need to do to beat the Bruins. The common theme is shutting down the Bergeron trio, but that’s much easier said than done considering that might be the strongest line in all of hockey.

That said, when Toronto goes up against a juggernaut of a line or an all-world player, we know who Babcock is usually going to call upon to be the answer: Nazem Kadri. When the Leafs go to Boston on Thursday night, there’s little doubt they’ll go with a plan to get the Kadri line against that killer unit of Pastrnak-Bergeron-Marchand as much as possible.

But with some returns from injury and a bit of tinkering, the Leafs’ lineup has changed and become optimized in the last number of weeks, so what does that really mean? The deployment Kadri has taken on the last number of times these teams played has changed in a pretty big way, and it brings with it some questions about how Babcock will roll things out this time around. Perhaps more importantly, it leaves us wondering how he might switch things up and move some star players around the lineup in-series should things not start off so hot. Kadri will likely be the rock of the roster in this series, but how he’s surrounded could get fluid.

It might seem overly simple to look at a single game when previewing two division rivals about to head to war for what could be seven, but I want to bring things back to late February when the Leafs and Bruins played on Hockey Night in Canada. In my eyes it was one of the better performances Toronto turned in all year against a top notch contender, and with the way Babcock approached it, there are definitely some ideas to pull from it, especially as it relates to next week’s games at the ACC where they’ll get the matches they want.

Looking back on the shift chart for that game, the story that emerges is pretty straightforward in terms of dealing with the Bergeron line: Babcock feels things out with his top two pairings against that trio, Marchand scores a pair, then he settles into a Zaitsev-Gardiner hard match from the back end, while the Kadri line is thrown to the wolves all game. (I won’t post the whole chart here because it’s enormous, but the always useful HockeyStats has what you’re looking for.)

Fortunately for Toronto, Babcock’s plan back then works out splendidly and they actually come out ahead in that matchup – every Leafs player is a positive in shot-attempt share for that game at evens, and the Bergeron line actually gets pushed on its heels a little overall.

So this seems simple, no? Just throw Kadri and the 22-51 pairing up against those guys and let the other lines hopefully get the best of Boston’s remaining lineup. It’s worked in the past.

Not so fast. Because the thing is, in that February game the Kadri line wasn’t what it is now. It was the old line flanked by Marleau and Komarov, while Marner moved up to play on with Nylander in Matthews’ absence.

So how does this change things? What seemed like a line that could be used purely in a shutdown fashion with Komarov now instead has the team’s leading scorer and one of the most offensively dynamic players league-wide in the second half of the season taking his place. Yeah, things are different.

As such, Babcock can approach things a few ways.

If you consider the top two lines essentially a wash in terms of capability or give the Matthews line a slight edge, you could roll out that line against Boston’s best and let the rest sort itself out. This opens up the Kadri line to potentially be your gamebreaker goals-wise, and allows the team’s hottest player, Marner, to go to work a little less hassled.

If Babcock is fine with having Matthews go up against Bergeron, it’ll be on the road where the Bruins control the matching. I’ll be interested to see if he tries to do anything to get 34 away from it.

It’s difficult to declare the Matthews line as your true best-on-best line because Marleau-Kadri-Marner is as good or better. They’re almost inter-changeable and that’s fantastic for the Leafs. Rolling out Kadri to take care of business like he usually does but this time alongside a much stronger supporting cast seems like a no-brainer, and that’s very likely the way things will start (smartly).

But if you buy into needing a physical guy like Komarov to go up against Boston’s top unit, perhaps leaving Marner there to potentially get dragged down offensively is something that raises some concern for you. (For me personally, it doesn’t)

That brings us to our third option.

This isn’t going to happen, or at least not early in the series. The lines, as of today, are unsurprisingly set as the following:

But should the Leafs get down in the series or have a hard time generating much in ways of offence, we could see something like Komarov being “promoted” and Marner being moved off that line, perhaps bumping Brown down the lineup (which I wouldn’t recommend) or even lining up with Pleks and Kapanen himself which would be a line that has a lot of offensive punch for a “fourth” (better idea, in my opinion).

This is a bit of a nuclear option and I really like the first two better, but it’s not that difficult to envision something along these lines if things get off to a rocky start.

For my money, the best approach will be simply rolling the Kadri unit (Marner in tow) out the way they have been in the past, supported by the Gardiner-Zaitsev pairing. I can almost guarantee that’s the way things will be early in this series, or at least as much as they can control it, but again, that Bergeron line will almost surely give the Buds a headache at some point, if not right away. If that’s the case and the series starts to get away from the Leafs, who knows, then things could get weird.