Troy Ryan takes responsibility.
Toronto is still sifting through the pieces after blowing a 2-0 series lead in the PWHL semifinals and the team’s head coach is putting the blame on himself.
Ryan will be thinking about his mistake for most of the off-season. It’s not a decision he made in Wednesday’s Game 5, when Toronto was eliminated in a 4-1 loss at home. It’s not something that happened in Game 4, Toronto’s first all year without star Natalie Spooner and a double-overtime 1-0 dud.
What Ryan regrets is what happened before Game 3 — or, rather, what didn’t happen.
“I didn’t have the ability to get our group ready for that game,” Ryan said Sunday. “I could’ve done a better job (to) set the tone that we had Minnesota in the place where we wanted them and good teams need to find a way to end things.”
Toronto won the first two games of the series — the first resoundingly, the second narrowly — and needed to win only one of the next three to book a trip to the Walter Cup final. Instead, Toronto lost three in a row and now sits on the sidelines as Minnesota and Boston duke it out for the championship. Boston won Game 1 4-3 on Sunday.
“Just because I’m saying something doesn’t mean they’re getting it,” Ryan said. “I have to do a better job of making them understand and believe that, when we had (Minnesota) where we needed them, we couldn’t let them up.”
Some Toronto players aren’t as sure that Game 3 was the start of the end. Sarah Nurse acknowledged that the middle game of the series was rough but said Toronto got better in the fourth game and played even better in the fifth.
“There was never a point in this series that I did not think we were going to win,” Nurse said. “It wasn’t like a cocky thing at all. It was just like, I felt so in control of the game and how we were playing.”
Now, the team looks to free agency, the draft and next season. But Ryan says he’ll be stewing over his mistake for most of the off-season.
And, for the players, it’s a missed opportunity.
“It hurts a lot,” goalie Kristen Campbell said. “I feel like we had all the pieces to do it this year.”
Captain Blayre Turnbull had different expectations. “I really did think we would still be playing hockey this week. It’s tough.”
There are silver linings, though. This was still a momentous season for the players — an endless list of firsts that had been chased for years, finally materializing during a renaissance for women’s sport in North America.
Toronto’s February game at Scotiabank Arena, which set an attendance record for women’s hockey with 19,285 fans, is one highlight. The game at Montreal’s Bell Centre, which broke that record with 21,105 fans, is another.
The attention demanded a learning curve. Nurse recalls a moment from early in the season when Toronto had lost five of its first seven games. She was sitting in a coffee shop, watching TV. She saw a headline saying Toronto was “looking for just their second win of the season.”
“I was like, we haven’t played that many games and we’re trying our best,” Nurse said. “Just to hear some things coming out in the media (that) you’ve witnessed for so long with the Leafs or the Oilers or whoever it is, now that’s happening to you. It’s like a come-to-Jesus moment, a little bit.”
