Toronto Maple Leafs vs Oilers: Road Trip Game 2
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs are in Edmonton tonight to take on the Oilers.
The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Calgary Flames on Monday by a score of 4-1 and will be looking to build on that games relatively strong defensive performance in tonight’s game.
The Leafs, who are 7-2-1 in their last ten games, will be facing an Edmonton team that is 26 places and 11 points below them in the standings. The Oilers can’t seem to buy a goal, despite being near the lead in many of the peripheral stats. They’ll be in tough tonight as they are now without goalie Cam Talbot for two weeks and will be starting Laurent Brossoit who has a save percentage under 900 and a goals against average over 3.00.
Facing Brossoit could be a fun night for the Leafs as they look to reignite their killer offense. Of course, the Oilers have Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid, so they’re never an easy team to face.
Lines
It just wouldn’t be a proper Leafs game if we didn’t worry at least a little about what kind of line combinations they were going to throw at us.
Sportsnet’s Mark Masters tweeted these lines out earlier:
Lines at Leafs morning skate
— Mark Masters (@markhmasters) November 30, 2017
Marleau-Kadri-Komarov
JvR-Bozak-Marner
Hyman-Leivo-Brown
Martin-Moore-Nylander
Soshnikov
Rielly-Hainsey
Gardiner-Zaitsev
Borgman-Polak
Carrick
Absent: Matthews ... will await update from Babcock (Auston practised in full yesterday)
After Matthews absence from practice caused a bit of a stir, Masters later reported that he will indeed play. I want to see Josh Leivo play as much as anyone (except, one assumes, for his mom) but I obviously don’t want it to be at the expense of Matthews.
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Unfortunately, this looks like another edition of ‘bench the young star player’ and I don’t know how playing less minutes with worse players is supposed to get a guy going, but Babock seems to think he does. I guess I’ll defer to him, but it does seem silly to me.
On defense, once again, the Leafs are inexplicably going with Polak. I don’t know what to say about that as it’s apparent that Carrick is miles and miles better, but what can you do? Just hope that McDavid doesn’t find himself on the ice with Polak and hope for the best, I guess.
Overall, the Leafs playing the Oilers is about as good a game as you can hope to see on TV. It might get a bit overhyped, but it’s still fun to watch Auston Matthews take on Connor McDavid. Speaking of Matthews, he went without a shot the other night for the first time in his career. It was 104 games!!! Crazy.
Anyways, tonight should be fun.
Thanks for reading.