The Toronto Maple Leafs iced some weird lines and easily defeated the Philadelphia Flyers last night.
With Auston Matthews on the bench with the regular season winding down against one of the NHL’s worst teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs were able to grind out yet another win for their current hot streak, which is now an 11-1-1 run.
With Matthews paused at 58 goals, you might have been excused for skipping this one, since it was on the first day after a long weekend and more or less an exhibition game.
Had you done so, however, you would have missed a very encouraging game by Jack Campbell and one of the nicest goals of the year, scored by Jason Spezza on a beautiful passing play with Wayne Simmonds and Mark Giordano, not to mention the career high goal of the NHL’s most underrated superstar.
Toronto Maple Leafs: William Nylander Still Doesn’t Get Enough Love
William Nylander scored his 32nd goal of the year and 76 points in 76 games. The NHL’s most underrated superstar is having a career season, and that silence you hear is the whiny “old uncle” portion of the Leafs fan base with nothing to say about the player they just arbitrarily chose to cheer against, for no reason, five years ago. (stats naturalstattrick.com).
Hilariously, even this season, when he has clearly stepped into the elite stratosphere of players (and really, he did so about three seasons ago, it’s just beyond obvious at this point), you still heard crying about Nylander’s supposed bad defense or his effort, even though he is, and has been for several seasons now, one of the best and most consistent players in the NHL.
In the last three seasons Nylander has the 28th most points in the NHL, even though he’s only been his team’s 4th scoring option during that time, and wasn’t even on the first power-play unit for much of that time.
Nylander has more points over the last three seasons that Svechnikov, Point, Kuznetsov, Forsberg, Rust, Ehlers, Petterson, Meir, Kadri etc. but don’t expect the media to ever properly rate him, despite all of the evidence.
It seems to me that about four or five years ago, some people, many of them in the media, decided they didn’t like a “rebellious youth” running their favorite team selected Nylander as an avatar to represent their distain for the new ideas of the Leafs’ revolutionary (by NHL standards) progressive management.
Even long after Nylander ascended to the elite ranks of NHL players (or Dubas to the elite ranks of NHL managers), they continue to run him down and complain about things they’d ignore in other elite-player’s games. It’s only gotten sillier with time, but since most of these people operate in a bubble where they don’t hear dissenting opinions, I honestly don’t think they realize how good Nylander is.
But whatever. William Nylander has proven to be one of the best Toronto Maple Leafs of all time, and if you’ve been so busy complaining about him that you didn’t get to enjoy it, that’s on you. The rest of us are having a great time.