Toronto Maple Leafs Fall to Senators, Andersen Continues to Struggle

The Toronto Maple Leafs outplayed the Ottawa Senators on Friday night, but a terrible five minutes cost them the game.

The Toronto Maple Leafs should have beaten the Ottawa Senators on Friday night, but should have’s and could have’s don’t really matter in professional sports.

Possession is one of the Leafs strongest attributes it was on full display against the Sens. 13 of the 18 skaters on the Leafs had a Corsi For percentage over 50 percent. Auston Matthews, Joe Thornton, William Nylander and John Tavares were all over 60 percent, which means they controlled the puck for the majority of play.

Even without going into a full breakdown of analytics, it was pretty easy to notice how much Toronto held possession. Instead of dumping the puck down the ice, the team did a great job of turning at their own blue-line, regrouping and getting a new line out there to make sure they still possessed the puck. There were also multiple times where Toronto was able to get two full shifts out of their forwards, while Ottawa was stuck in their own zone for a full two-minutes 5v5.

If you played this game over again, which fortunately the team gets to do tonight, Toronto would probably win 70 percent of the time.

Whenever the Leafs lose to Ottawa it’s disappointing, but every point means so much more this season. Toronto is supposed to dominate the Senators all season, but after their match-up last night, I’d expect the nation’s capital to be a young, scrappy team that’s harder to play against than we expected.

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

Good:

• Zach Hyman
  • The 28-year-old became a dad yesterday and used that dad-strength to bat in the first goal of the game last night. Congrats, Zach!

Bad:

• T.J. Brodie:
  • Brodie had 21 minutes of ice-time but looked lost for the majority of it. He finished last on the team with a -28.5 Relative Corsi For Percentage and 33.3 Corsi For Percentage (via: hockeyreference.com). Brodie’s inability to get into the right defensive position cost the Leafs the 2-2 goal as well, which sparked Ottawa’s comeback..
• Power-play/First-Line:
  • The Leafs scored on two of their six power-play’s last night, which is pretty good. However, they never capitalized when they needed to and their power-play should be their biggest weapon. If the Leafs would’ve scored one more power-play goal during the second or at the start of the third, it could have stopped Ottawa’s momentum.
  • 0 points combined for Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and Joe Thornton is unacceptable, especially when you’re playing Ottawa. The line tried to be too fancy on Friday night, always looking for the right pass, instead of getting pucks to the net.

Ugly: 

• Freddie Andersen
  • Early season Andersen is back to his old ways. In back-to-back games, Andersen has been terrible and if he played even mediocre last night, the Leafs would have won. Andersen allowed five goals on 24 shots, which was good enough for a .792 save percentage. If Jack Campbell has a good game tonight, don’t be shocked if he gets another start on Monday.

The Leafs played fine on Friday night, but will need a much better team-effort on Saturday night to split the back-to-back. Let’s hope that Jack Campbell can provide a spark for the team and hopefully we’ll see Mikko Lehtonen or Nick Robertson inserted as well.