The Toronto Maple Leafs are up 3-1 in the series and heading home.
If you’re a fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, you still don’t like their chances. In the history of pro sports, few, if any teams have left their fans high and dry with so many, and so frequent, seemingly impossible collapses.
So while the Leafs may seem firmly in control to the laymen, I doubt any of us are all that confident.
That said, there is reason for optimism overall, because the Leafs are manhandling a pretty good team, and they’re doing it at half power.
Toronto Maple Leafs, Half Power Edition
So far in this series, despite averaging six shots per game, Auston Matthews has points in just one of them. Nick Foligno hasn’t really contributed, and obviously, John Tavares has not scored. The power-play does have three goals, it’s been terrible for months now and has only occasionally looked dangerous this series.
Despite all this, the Toronto Maple Leafs have dismantled the Canadiens over four games. Makes you wonder what they’ll do when everything is clicking, if it ever does.
Montreal can hit, but so what. They don’t get to the Leafs net, they can’t do anything against their perfect (so far) PK, and the Leafs have gotten 53% of the shot attempts and 58% of the expected goals. If not for a stellar performance by Carey Price in game one, this series would have ended tonight.
There are many reasons why the Leafs have done so well, but two main ones are William Nylander and Jack Campbell, who have been so good that you barely notice that Matthews has points in only one game so far. (naturalstattrick.com).
I think if you said before the series that it’d get to game five and Matthews and Tavares would have combined to score points in just one game, you’d have thought the Leafs would be in trouble.
The fact that Matthews is definitely going to start scoring, and that if they play long enough, they might even get John Tavares back, should definitely strike fear into the hearts of other teams.
The Toronto Maple Leafs impressively chugged along all year, only being eliminated from the President’s Trophy in the final week, and despite that, they are yet to show the world a team where both top lines are scoring, the power-play is working, their goalies are playing well and they are healthy.
It is really exciting to think about how good they might be when firing on all cylinders. If this version of the Leafs can be so good, what will they look like with a healthy roster, both top lines scoring, a hot goalie and strong special teams? We’ve yet to see them assemble all their strengths at once, at least not for any length of time, which is crazy considering how good they’ve been.
This version of the Toronto Maple Leafs might not even have shown what it’s truly capable of.