Toronto Maple Leafs Look to Start New Streak

The Toronto Maple won six in a row before losing to the Arizona Coyotes the other night.

The Toronto Maple Leafs take on the Panthers tonight in Florida as they look to begin another winning streak.   The game should feature Frederick Andersen vs Robert Luongo.

Monday’s game was an unfortunate end to the six game winning streak.  The Leafs got off to a bad start, being out-shot 10-1 in the first ten minutes, but after that were pretty dominant, finishing with 61%CF.  They lost by one of the worst video reviews I’ve ever seen and an unlucky crossbar that would have tied it.

It’s funny, after the game everyone was talking about how Matthews wasn’t himself.  All he did was get five individual scoring chances, put up a 62% possession rating and score two goals (basically) that didn’t count.  If that’s him when he ‘doesn’t look good’  I’d hate to see what he can do when he’s looking good.  Of course, people routinely say that about every players return game, and I thought he looked alright, so who knows?

I did think it was lame that the NHL called back a goal on the cheapest goalie interference call possible, when it would have let Arizona raised Auston Matthews score the tying goal against his former favorite team in his 100th game.  Had that counted it would almost have been storybook-like.  But whatever.

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Florida Panthers

According to Mark Masters (sportsnet) Nikita Soshnikov is in and Dominic Moore is out.  He posited that this could mean a move to centre for Marleau (and one presumes that means Bozak would be on the fourth line?) If that is the case, then at least Connor Brown won’t be on the fourth line, which continues to be one of the most unjust uses of a player in the NHL.

The Panthers have a record of 7-11-2 and are one of the worst run teams in professional sports.  Prior to Last season, they realized that even though their record the season before was good, that they had defied all analytics, gotten lucky and needed to make some changes if they wanted to improve.

Panthers Aren’t Good!

This was the kind of rare self-honesty that is almost never seen in the world of sports.  The Panthers were criticized by results-obsessed people who did not think there was anything to fix in the first place, and among these critics were 100% of ‘old school’ hockey thinkers – the exact people threatened by the potential success of the Panthers new philosophy.

Unfortunately, despite suffering long term injuries to two of their three most important players, the Panthers wrongly attributed their weak start to the season as a referendum on analytics and fired their GM only to re-hire the guy, Dale Tallon, who that had fired just a few months earlier.

The Panthers decided to become a team that would trust the process and trust the long-term results to take care of themselves.  But ironically, they could only trust the process for about six weeks before panicking in a hilarious and embarrassing way.

The result is that Tallon came back and set about reversing many of their recent moves.  He deep-sixed Reilly Smith, John Marchessault and Mark Pysyk, as well as laughably trying to re-acquire noted boat-anchor Eric Gudbranson in moves that made no sense from a hockey perspective, but tons of sense from a spite perspective.

Next: You Can't Replace Star Players with Fringe Players

So anyways, hopefully the Toronto Maple Leafs destroy them tonight.