Optimist Reims gives a No. 1 effort
Unshaken by his shaky start, Reimer shuts down Stars in surprise appearance
It was early in his career as a Maple Leaf that goaltender James Reimer was tagged by fans with a nickname.
It’s Optimus Reim, a riff on Optimus Prime, the fictional character from the Transformers toy and movie franchise. The non-fiction version, then, would be Optimist Reims. Certainly it’s an apt descriptor of one of the great observers of the bright side currently residing on the often grim Toronto sports landscape.
Consider the way Reimer was looking at the world on Monday morning as he lounged in his dressingroom stall chatting with reporters. All indications at the morning skate pointed to teammate Jonathan Bernier getting his third straight start in that night’s game against the Dallas Stars. And Reimer didn’t seem perturbed by this notion. Never mind that he had started all of three of Toronto’s opening 10 games, and that he hadn’t played to his standards all told.
A reporter inquired about how he was dealing with the lack of early-season success.
“I don’t even know what my save percentage is,” he said.
Then he smiled a big smile and acknowledged that maybe he did.
“Well, I know it’s not good,” he said. “But I also I know I’m probably one game from it being a lot better. There’s no need to start pounding on the panic button.”
Not long after those words left his mouth, Leafs coach Mike Babcock announced that Reimer would be Monday night’s starter. Bernier, the coach said, “got bumped” in Saturday’s 4-0 loss to the Penguins and wasn’t feeling good — although Bernier was good enough to dress as Toronto’s backup.
Gifted the crease, Reimer made 43 saves in a 4-1 win to help give the Leafs their second victory of the 11-game-old season, their first on home ice. It was easily Toronto’s best goaltending performance the season — faint praise, really, considering neither Bernier nor Reimer had previously come up with a truly exceptional outing. But on a night that saw Reimer stop a third-period penalty shot, among a handful of other pointblank chances, a Leafs goaltender finally managed to steal a win against a superior team. There’s a first time for everything, one supposes.
And there’ll be another time for No. 34. After the game Babcock said Reimer will get the start in Wednesday’s home game against the Winnipeg Jets.
Rather than grouse about the lack of talent at his disposal, he continued to point to his team’s lack of resiliency in rough patches.
“I’ve said a number of times that when things go wrong, the stick-toit-ive-ness that you need to be good at anything in life hasn’t been (there) . . . We have to get better at (that),” he said. “We’ve got to trust one another and trust structure and trust work ethic and take care of the puck and we can have some success. I’m still a big believer that we can win with this group. And so that’s what I’m selling.”
Babcock has also been peddling the idea that one of the Toronto goaltenders should be possessed of the No. 1 label. And Bernier, clearly, has been his early-season choice. But on Monday, with Reimer shining, the coach’s perception of the situation changed, at least a bit.
Bernier’s injury was confounding, to be sure. He was too injured to start the game but not too injured to possibly finish it should Reimer have been rendered unable to continue. Maybe it made sense to somebody. And maybe it was a perfectly reasonable approach to crease management. Still, given Babcock’s devotion to the virtues of enduring pain, it wasn’t exactly an announcement of Bernier’s tolerance for discomfort.
Certainly other Leafs showed off respectable amounts of stick-to-itive-ness — not least Reimer. Less than a minute after Brad Boyes made it 1-0 for the home team about eight minutes into the opening frame, Reimer was beaten by a shot by Jamie Benn that made it 1-1. It was a save that probably should have been made. And it would have been easy enough to envision the Leafs allowing the bad break to unleash a downward spiral of blue and white despair. But the home team didn’t wallow, even if they occasionally got a little lucky. Moments after Dallas’s Radek Faksa hit the post on a second-period shorthanded breakaway, Joffrey Lupul buried his second goal of the game to make it 3-1. Toronto, mind you, had another would-be goal — this one by Boyes — called back on a second-period coach’s challenge that ruled Byron Froese had been offside some 12 seconds before the apparent goal. Time was rolled back. Again, the Leafs didn’t wallow.
Reimer, for his part, never seems to.
“It’s a small sample size,” he said before Monday’s game, smiling at the idea of the grim stat line attached to his name. “If you look at Bernie for the most part, yeah, the wins aren’t there. But I think he’s played some really good hockey. He’s made some really big saves and come up big for us. I’m sure there’s a lot of games in there that we could have won if everything had come together as a team”
On Monday, Reimer was as good as he’s been in a long while. Optimist Reims, indeed.