Toronto Maple Leafs at Least Make It Interesting at the End

The Toronto Maple Leafs lost yet again to the Ottawa Senators on Sunday night.

Losers of four of five coming into the game (despite actually playing very solid in four of those games) the Toronto Maple Leafs looked to have a gimme against the last place Senators and emergency starter Joey Daccord.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

In a somewhat bizarre game, the best thing you can really say is that the Leafs made it interesting at the end there.

Toronto Maple Leafs Lose Again

This game was weird.

For instance:

The NHL’s best team is playing the NHL’s worst team, and the NHL’s worst team plays a goalie with zero career wins who only learned he was starting apparently just minutes before the game (I don’t know if the broadcast brought this up at all!).

Pierre Engvall had a goal called back for the second night in a row.  He only has two other goals all year…..call me biased but that was a crap call. Goal should have counted.

The Senators scored twice in seven seconds, which, of course they  did.

The real Michael Hutchinson finally showed up.

The Senators then scored twice in under a minute on shots that any NHL goalie should be expected to stop, especially one whose team hopes to win the Stanley Cup.

Then there was the Leafs making it interesting by pulling their goalie with (I think) almost seven minutes left and actually almost pulling it off.  Of course if they had, Brady Tkachuk might have to have changed his name to Patrick Stefan, but I digress.

The weirdest thing was probably the fact that the Leafs (for who knows how many times this season but it seems like too many) got only one power play over an entire game.  It should be next to impossible to ever only call one penalty against a team in an NHL game, considering each shift features at least some interference, slashing and crosschecking, but here we are.

Now I’m not saying the Leafs “deserved” to win, because they didn’t play that good or anything, but both goalies were completely garbage and at least three of the Sens goals should have been saved.  It’s also just ridiculous that the Leafs can have the puck so much and never get any calls in their favor. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

And I don’t know what has to happen to make William Nylander get more ice time, but he’s been the NHL’s best player for a couple weeks now and maybe the Leafs win this game if he gets an extra four minutes.

The Leafs have had a bad spell here, but frankly, they were due.   A little adversity to shake off the mid season complacency is probably a good thing, but I can’t help thinking that with some even slightly below professional standard officiating, the Leafs would have got an extra six points this week.

For what it’s worth, the Toronto Maple Leafs currently rank 29th in the NHL in minutes on the power-play per game.