Toronto Maple Leafs Hit Break on Bitter-Sweet Note
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs have won four in a row.
After winning their third game in a row without Auston Matthews (and fourth overall) the Toronto Maple Leafs are off until Thursday. Obviously it’s great that they are on a winning streak, but an honest assessment of their play over the four games is not flattering.
Clearly teams have ebbs and flows, and if you’re ever going to play badly, it’s likely to be when you don’t have their best player. So I don’t want to get too critical here – wins are good and at the end of the night, if your team wins, what do you care how it happened? You probably shouldn’t.
If, however, you want to know what their chances are to keep winning, and you’re interested in knowing whether or not there’s a chance they’ll win a championship, it’s worth looking into what actually happened in the games instead of just focusing on the result.
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The results for these last four games were good, but the process was not. If Andersen (and MacElhinney) hadn’t bailed them out over the last week, one which followed a streak of six losses in nine games, the team would be in an utter tailspin right now.
Thankfully that isn’t the case, but it easily could have been.
The Games
On Monday they needed overtime to beat an expansion that was on a fairly long road trip and which was using their fourth-string goalie. Wednesday saw them play one of their worst games of the year against the Wild, and somehow win. Friday wasn’t as bad as the other three games, but certainly they were lucky to pick up the W.
Saturday’s game was brutal. The Bruins top line was absolutely dominating (almost 80% possession) and the Rielly/Hainsey/Kadri/Komarov/Nylander unit that faced them the most was just absolutely destroyed. I have to say, I didn’t know Curtis MacElhinney had a performance like that in him.
Either way, in a long season you win games you should have lost and vice versa. No big deal. However, there is a tendency to get too excited about a winning streak, especially one coinciding with the absence of a team’s best player.
On the other hand, the Leafs are never going to be too hard to play against when their centres are Kadri-Bozak-Marleau-Moore there is just no getting around how weak that is, and I think the stats bear it out, even if the victories do not. Ideally, only one of those four centres will be dressing for the Leafs first playoff game this spring.
What we do know about the Toronto Maple Leafs to this point is that they can score, and they’re probably the fastest skating team in the NHL. They might not have the best defense, but even average goaltending is going to make them hard to beat. If Andersen gets hot, and they’re healthy, they’ll be unstoppable.
Especially if they use the assets they have available to improve their team. And especially when Marner and Nylander’s shooting percentage normalizes and the goals start going in for them.