The Toronto Maple Leafs Do Something Rare and Exciting

The Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Philadelphia Flyers last night.

Fortunately for the Toronto Maple Leafs, they lost in a shoot-out, where a loss isn’t really a loss.

The Leafs made a nice comeback and once again the best player on their team was William Nylander, who is on fire with his second multi-point game in the last three.

Nylander has eight points in his last nine games, a stretch which also includes a game where he set up three goals and only received an assist on one of them.  And he’s doing it while being among the Leafs best defensive players as well.

For the Toronto Maple Leafs, they picked up a point in their fifth straight game, which is something they only managed to do three times last season.  To me, that qualifies as a rare and exciting event.

During this time, they’ve climbed to 8th place in the NHL despite playing three of the top four teams for 27% of their schedule and playing in their fifth back-to-back in just over a month.

They can match last season’s best streak by picking up a point tonight against the Blackhawks.

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Flyers

The Leafs would have won last night’s game in regulation (which would have been their fourth win in a row) had the Flyers not scored an extremely flukey goal which tipped off a players stick, then his knee in order to beat Freddie Andersen who was otherwise spectacular.

It could have even been a shut-out if Andersen hadn’t of let in a pretty brutal 40 footer, but then again, it seems like whenever Andersen lets in a bad goal he uses the shame to fuel himself to unbeatability.

Overall, the Toronto Maple Leafs played an OK game, though I’m sure they’d prefer to allow less scoring chances in general.  Their first period was really good, but as the game went on I thought the Flyers played better.

That is, except for overtime, where the Leafs were completely dominant, outshooting the Flyers 7-1 (though that shot total doesn’t include a 2-1 they whiffed on and a post they hit).  The Leafs could probably have won it in O.T if there was more time on the clock, but unfortunately they had to go to the coin-flip known as the shootout.  Oh well!

There was a scary moment when Mitch Marner’s knee bent the wrong way, and he won’t play tonight, but I think we got lucky because Marner tried to come back and seemed to want to continue playing.

If the injury was as bad as it looked, he probably wouldn’t have tried to to that.

The Leafs will play again tonight in Chicago.