The Young Toronto Maple Leafs Take Next Step

The Toronto Maple Leafs got lucky Friday night.

The Toronto Maple Leafs won a game in which they had a 99% chance of losing,  and they did it in the most improbable fashion.

Whether this sends the Leafs on a mad run, or even if it just staved off elimination for a day, it will eventually be seen as the foundational turning point of a great team.

Long called a soft, careless, immature team that just didn’t ‘have what it takes’ to win, the Leafs proved their doubters wrong with one of the best performances in NHL history.

Sure, it was lucky. No doubt. Doesn’t mean it didn’t also require a ton of determination and no-quit attitude.

The Toronto Maple leafs played four games so far, and they deserved to win all four of them.  Three of them they deserved to win walking away, and game one was a coin flip, but one in which the Leafs superior shooting talent would usually come out on top in.

Leafs Are Dangerous

Everyone said the Leafs would be outmatched physically.  That hasn’t been the case at all.  Columbus has no psychical advantage over the Leafs.

Defense? That was supposed to be Columbus strength.  Through four games the Leafs have 122 scoring chances, good for 56% of the total.

In the regular season, the Leafs, the league’s second best offense, averaged 29.57 scoring chances per 60 minutes of 5v5 ice time. (All stats naturalstattrick.com).

Against Columbus and their vaunted defense, the Leafs are getting 30.5 scoring chances per 60.

So basically when the Leafs have to play all of their games against “the suffocating defense” of the Columbus Blue Jackets, they do better than normal.

The reason for that is because the Jackets were never  a truly great defensive team.  They don’t seem to understand that you can aggressively forecheck, or you can clog the neutral zone, but you can’t do both.

Anyways, the only reason the Toronto Maple Leafs didn’t win in three straight games was because of the Blue Jackets goalies.

First, Joonas Korpisalo went a game and a half without allowing a goal, then when he as replaced, Elvis Merzlikens did the same thing.

Two separate occurrences of two different goals, in four games, going 50+ shots without allowing a goal.  That is crazy, and extremely unlucky.

So if the Leafs got lucky to win on Friday, that happened because a massive balancing was in order.

Two separate goalies each going on a 50+ save streak in a matter of four games is probably an NHL record.

The fact that the Leafs went two-and-a-half games and only allowed a single goal and somehow came out of it down 2-1 is also perplexing.

Incredibly, despite the 2-2 series tie, and the Leaf inability to score at a consistent rate, they’ve been an incredibly consistent team.   The Blue Jackets goalies just tried to prevent anyone from noticing.

It took winning four games in a row just to get two victories, so hopefully the Leafs can keep it going tonight.  Go Leafs!

But whatever happens, the fact is the Leafs core players came through under pressure, when it counted, in the craziest of circumstances.  That is great progress.