Toronto Maple Leafs Lose Highly Entertaining Game

The Toronto Maple Leafs lost 5-3 to the L.A Kings last night.

With the loss, the Toronto Maple Leafs are now losers of four of their last five games.  That’s OK though.  The NHL is a high parity league, and at least half the games can go either way.

Of the six games the Leafs have lost, at least four, maybe five of them could have been won had the Leafs gotten a lucky break.  This isn’t to make excuses or say that the they can’t improve, only to point out that as long as you’re not getting beat badly, there’s no real reason to put too much stock into wins and losses in the short term.

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As the seventh best 5v5 possession team, and the top scoring 5v5 team, in the NHL, the Leafs are fine.  Their record should probably be a bit better that it is, but even at their current pace they would finish ten games above .500, whereas last year they made the playoffs losing two more games than they won.   Basically if you go 8-6 every 14 games, you’re doing alright.

Last Night’s Game

The game last night might have ended in a loss, but it was highly entertaining.  Since it’s on the west coast, and at one point the Leafs were down 5-0 maybe a lot of people didn’t stay to the end, but the Leafs somehow managed to make a game of it and had Matthews scored on his second penalty shot of the game (!) the game may have ended up being one of the great finishes of all time.

It was pretty amusing, Ray Ferraro, the colour guy on the Sportsnet broadcast, was saying, after Matthews’ first penalty shot, that he (Ray) only had two at any level in his entire career.  Then of course, ten minutes later Matthews get his second of the game.

I figure I’ve seen tens of thousands of NHL highlight packages + games watched in my life and I’ve never heard of anyone getting two penalty shots in the same game – I imagine it’s a rarity on par with back-to-back no hitters or something like that.

Add in a furious finish, an intense goal review and a total of eight goals, and you have yourself one of the most entertaining games of the season.

This game also featured another quietly dominating performance from Morgan Rielly, as well as an excellent showing from Kasperi Kapanen.  I don’t know how he can get taken out of the lineup at this point, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Next: Why Andersen is Almost Sure to Get Better

Next up: St. Louis

stats from naturalstattrick.com