Toronto Maple Leafs: Well…..That Was Not Fun

The Toronto Maple Leafs just played one of the worst games of the season, in being shut-out to about 25% of the Coyotes lineup.

It’s Saturday night. You’ve got your beer,  you’ve got your chips.  It’s been a long week of work and you are psyched to sit back, relax, and watch the boys in blue and white play on Hockey Night in Canada.  It’s the Toronto Maple Leafs vs Arizona Coyotes, so it should be a fun, high scoring night.

Afterall, the Leafs have several of the best players in the NHL, while Arizona is suffering through one of the worst injury season in recent memory and can barely cobble together a team.

It’s the slam dunk of the season.  Leafs should entertain you with at least eight goals.

You settle in, crack a beer, and get ready for your favorite part of the week…..only to be severely disappointing by the worst game of the season.

What Did We Just Watch?

It’s OK to lose.  Even the best team of all time is going to lose 25% of their games.  In the NHL, you never know what you’re going to get – there’s a lot of parity and the worst teams aren’t that far off the best teams.  For the most part.

But the Leafs are elite, and the Coyotes, not great to start with, are decimated by injury, so we’re expecting a beat-down.

And what we got was 60 minutes of the most passive, uninspired, boring, terrible hockey imaginable.

The Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t just get shut-out by a goalie having a great game, they were shutdown entirely.  They deserved that loss.

Down 2-0 they were out-possessed to the tune of 65% to 35% in the third period. They had tons of power-play opportunities and blew every single one of them.

At least one good thing happened: Mike Babcock finally saw the light and used Ron Hainsey the least out of all his defenseman at 5v5.  Hainsey was brutal, as usual, and posted a 34% CF on the night, but at least he was used properly.

There were only two Leafs who showed up last night, and they were the only two who finished above 50% CF: William Nylander and Jake Gardiner.

Patrick Marleau had one of the worst games I’ve seen an NHL player have.

In the end, it’s just one game.  I wouldn’t put too much stock in it, the Leafs had four games in six nights, and the Coyotes game was the only game they had in the four nights following that.  It was the end of a long road trip, and I’m sure they were just looking forward to two days off.

So bad game, but no real worries – it’s a long season and it happens.

stats from naturalstattrick.com