Toronto Maple Leafs Win but Sheldon Keefe Has to Be Better

The Toronto Maple Leafs are an exercise in irony.

After losing four straight games in which they vastly outplayed their opponents and deserved to win, the Toronto Maple Leafs were badly outplayed by the Winnipeg Jets last night and yet came away, somehow, with a 5-3 victory.

Such is the game of hockey.

The Leafs got a much better performance from Jack Campbell than they have grown accustomed to in the last week or so, while Nick Foligno made his (mostly uneventful) debut.  He did pick up an assist on an empty-netter, so that’s something.

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Jets

The Leafs weren’t exactly destroyed in this game – the Jets held a  slight edge in all 5v5 stats, but nothing too crazy – but considering that they usually dominate the Jets pretty badly (though the worst team seems to win a lot in this specific season series) it wasn’t a very good game for them.

Who could blame them, however, with Zach Hyman and Ilya Mikheyev on the bench? (And Bogosian though that doesn’t have much of an impact).

The Leafs best players in this game where Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Rasmus Sandin.  No one else really stood out for good reasons, but Holl and Muzzin were absolutely abysmal.

After a couple games with different partners, the Leafs but their reliable pairing back together and the results were not pretty. In over 19 minutes together, the Jets controlled almost 66% of the play, and scored two of their three goals.

Other than then when the Leafs had Muzzin/Holl on the ice, they were pretty decent, with Matthews pretty much taking the game over whenever he was out there.  Though Matthews played with Marner and Foligno most of the night, in the two minutes he was paired with Tavares and Nylander they had 100% of the shot attempts (4-0) three shots, and two dangerous scoring chances. That is a line I’d like to see more of.  (naturalstattrick.com).

Sandin and Dermott played an even night, but I just really like watching Sandin play – he’s so confident with the puck and so clearly too good to be on a third pairing.  It’s interesting because the Leafs are a top team with Cup aspirations and it’s difficult to break a player like this in, but I would pretty much take any bet that says Sandin is going to be the Leafs best defenseman in a year or less.

And this is a team where three defenseman are ranked better than 83% of other NHL defenseman or higher.  Sandin is that good.  As for Foligno, he had one shot and the top line was worse than it usually is.  It’s his first game and he sat out for over a week, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I would however, like to see him playing in a more appropriate spot in the lineup – Foligno is not a first liner at this point in his career.

Overall, the Leafs were lucky to win this one, and Sheldon Keefe has got to make some adjustments because there were a lot of bad lineup decisions last night – no Robertson, Sandin not enough ice time, Foligno on the first line, Joe Thornton on the PP etc.

In closing, someone is going to have to explain to me how two divisional rivals can play a game for first place and the Leafs only get  single power-play.