Mike Babcock thinks his players need to chill

Babcock: I keep telling the guys in this market, maybe more so than any market, you have to have something away from hockey that you love to do, so you don’t focus on hockey.  If you focus on hockey all the time, it just wears you out and you come to the rink with no energy.  And so, if you have a family or you have kids, or, ah...I don’t care, you like bowhunting or you like doing something, it keeps you mind away from hockey and wearing yourself into the ground

That wisdom was sandwiched between discussion of Frederik Andersen, who had the best night of his short Leafs career so far.  Perhaps it’s more honest to call it the least bad night.  Either way, it’s hard not to hear that as being about Andersen more than just the long list of young rookies who likely need to heed the advice too.

And if he was thinking of Andersen, he was also, intentionally or not, conjuring an image of another goaltender: Carey Price, the chillest of the chill in the net, and a man who fills his offseason with a particular hobby.

Bowhunting is a lot like goaltending. You need patience, timing, instincts. You endure long periods of inaction before rapid bursts of intensity. You have to settle your nerves to near-permafrost level, separating mind from body, thinking clearly, acting swiftly. You must sense what will happen before it happens; it takes tremendous mental and physical endurance. Like many things, some people are just born with it.

Andersen is taking an approach to his game preparation that fits with Babcock’s advice.

I think I tried to have a little more fun yesterday and this morning just to get my mind off of everything, and that’s when you can be able to relax the most, when you have fun, and you feel loose, so that was probably the biggest difference.

There is likely no better model for Andersen to look at for how to cope with life in Toronto than Price.  From the same profile, he talks about the spotlight in Montréal.

This is hockey in Montreal, home to the NHL’s most decorated club, which has, for one reason or another, failed to win anything of consequence for 20 years. More specifically, this is goaltending in Montreal, a role that has been filled by so many legendary figures in the game’s history that the position has taken on a mythology of its own. As if it’s bigger than everything else happening on the ice. “Guys could go nuts playing net here,” Price says. “It’s definitely taxing mentally. You learn a lot of lessons playing in a place like this; you face a lot more pressure than other teams. But winning is the cure for everything.”

In Toronto the legends are of great goaltending failures or great unappreciated efforts.  Toronto fans expecting a “Toskala” rather than a Vezina doesn’t change the sheer amount of attention Andersen will get from them and the media of all kinds.

But winning is the cure for everything.