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Maple Leafs regroup for stretch run

Centre Auston Matthews sat out the NHL all-star game’s on-ice events with a sore wrist but with be back in action for the Maple Leafs on Monday night against the Nashville Predators. (Claus Andersen/Getty Images)
Centre Auston Matthews sat out the NHL all-star game’s on-ice events with a sore wrist but with be back in action for the Maple Leafs on Monday night against the Nashville Predators. (Claus Andersen/Getty Images)

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NASHVILLE — The mathematicians have taken their run at the Maple Leafs the past two weeks, many calculating a bleak summary of their playoff hopes.

So it was over to Sheldon Keefe on Sunday to take stock of what’s needed in the club’s final 33 games, gathering his gang for the first time in eight days, during which a few teams used games in hand to edge the Leafs out of a post-season spot and sweat the NHL all-star break.

“We recognize we have a lot of games in a short amount of time coming up,” Keefe said after practice. “It’s going to be a grind all the way through. We also recognize the situation in the standings, that it will be likely a battle to the very end (two April home games against Detroit and Montreal).

“But we have to focus on every day as it comes, starting today with our practice and a good productive meeting to set the tone for what remains.”

With the Leafs back from various vacation retreats, or the all-star game in St. Louis, with two activated from the injury list and one Marlies call-up, Keefe and his assistants tried to get the players to move away from the pre-break slump. The exasperated Keefe chirped about their “immature” response in the last home game against Chicago.

“We tried to paint a picture to our guys that it’s easy to focus a lot on how things finished in the past six games,” Keefe said. “But that’s just one sample. We could pick a bigger sample and it presents an entirely different picture in terms of the progress we’ve made as a team and reason to believe we can get things back in the right direction.

“You look at the first 20 games since I got here (in mid-November), something like 15-4-1 and 1-2-3 in the six games since. It’s two different looks, two different teams. We’d like to think we’re a bit more like the team in the first 20. We want to come back out and show that (on Monday). We realize it will take some time to get back up and running. We’re playing a (Nashville) team in the same boat as us, I’d like to see a positive response.”

Leading scorer Auston Matthews, back with Mitch Marner and Zach Hyman after sitting out the all-star game’s on-ice events with a sore wrist, was part of an energetic but loose workout as the Leafs traded stories about where they’d been for the holiday.

“It’s tight, every game is going to matter, every point matters,” Matthews said. “Just making sure we’re starting games well and doing a lot of things we need to do.”

That wasn’t the case in two of the final three games, when Florida and Chicago were all over the Leafs early and Frederik Andersen wasn’t helping matters in net. Keefe was ready to forgive and forget — until the last game, when Toronto should have wanted to go on its break with a solid effort, but could not match the intensity of another playoff-challenged team, the Blackhawks.

“That’s not what you want to be about,” Keefe lectured. “We want to be a team that rises to those occasions, to finish the job. The fact we weren’t able to do that was disappointing. That’s an area of growth and opportunity for us.

“(This was a) chance to have everyone go away and re-group a little bit in particular with how things finished for us. I think that served us well.”

The Leafs continue the road trip to Dallas on Wednesday to end January then start the new month with four games in six nights next week, mostly against non-playoff teams.

“There are a lot of good things we’ve been doing,” observed defenceman Jake Muzzin, who returns Monday from a month away with a broken foot. “We have to tighten up some things defensively and we’ll be okay.”

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