Toronto Maple Leafs: The Old Guy Looked Pretty Sharp
Toronto Maple Leafs fans everywhere have to be pleased with Patrick Marleau’s performance last night.
Even though the Toronto Maple Leafs lost the game, Marleau shined, so who says that the Leafs are no country for old men?
I’ve been patiently waiting for an image of Patty to appear with our image provider and thankfully a few have finally popped up.
Yes, Marleau scored his first goal as a member of the Leafs and I have an interesting statistic for you.
His first preseason goal as a member of the San Jose Sharks was scored on September 14, 1997, and his first preseason goal with Leafs came just over 20 years later, September 19, 2017.
See, advanced statistics can be fun (that was a joke).
Let’s go over the few Leafs highlights from the game last night, but I’m going to quickly address the elephant in the room.
LTIR to IR, the Joffrey Lupul Story
That’s coming to a theatre near you very soon.
Reports came in this morning that Joffrey Lupul has been moved from long-term injured reserve to just injured reserve.
Here’s the problem, if he’s not on LTIR, then his cap is back in the books.
The league has, I believe, until tomorrow night to ‘investigate’ the situation that’s been unfolding the last couple of days.
I’d expect more on this to follow within the next 24 hours, but let’s hope his contract isn’t back in the Leafs system cap wise.
Box Score
Marleau wasn’t the only one to score a pretty goal for the Leafs, but we’ll get there soon.
First up, let’s have a little look at the games box score.
Feel free to click that little orange (red?) button to have a look at the scoring summary and some other statistics as we’ll be referring to them below.
For Marleau’s goal, it’s quite simple.
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He received the puck on the wing and streaked up the ice, firing home a beautiful shot with limited space for the puck to meet twine.
Perfect snipe.
Heading over to the Leafs second goal of the night, we were graced with a terrific tic, tac, toe play.
An unofficial assist goes to Tyler Bozak for creating space in front of the net, without him taking out his man, the puck probably wouldn’t have crossed the goal line on that play.
The goalscorer, James van Riemsdyk, also racked up seven shots on net throughout the night, game leading by three shots and that’s including the Senators.
All in all, there’s work to be done, but I’ll say it again, it’s just the preseason, chill.
I know that Mike Babcock’s not too happy, but this is no indication as to how the Leafs will play during the regular season.
The boys are back in action on Friday night against the Buffalo Sabres (potential Alex Nylander v. William Nylander matchup) at Ricoh Coliseum.
Puck drops at 7:30 PM.