Toronto Maple Leafs: The NHL Season Begins Today (For Real)
The Toronto Maple Leafs will play their first game of the 2022-23 NHL Season tomorrow night against the Montreal Canadiens.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are coming off of a franchise record 115 point season that saw them finish fourth overall.
Unfortunately, the Leafs drew the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning in round one and were unable to advance, despite a good showing, and playing well enough to deserve the victory.
The Leafs were already one of the best teams in the league, and so they didn’t do too much this summer other than shuffle around some depth pieces and swap out their goalies.
They enter the season as one of the main contenders for the Stanley Cup and with sky-high expectations for their star-studded team.
Toronto Maple Leafs Begin New Season
The NHL already kicked off this weekend with some games in Europe they basically neglected to mention were happening.
By accident I overheard that the Sharks were playing the Predators in Prague this weekend to kick off the NHL season in relative anonymity. The NHL really should have told more people about this, but in case you don’t know, the Sharks lost both games.
The North American portion of the season kicks off tonight with Tampa taking on the Rangers in New York, and Vegas taking on the Kings in LA.
There are six games Wednesday, including the Leafs at Montreal.
After (one assumes) beating Montreal (likely by a 4-1 score) the Leafs will come home and host Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals on Thursday night.
They get one day off, then it’s their third game in four nights with the Senators at home Saturday. This is a great way to kick off the season – with an absolute ton of hockey.
The second week of the schedule sees the Toronto Maple Leafs play Arizona, Dallas and Winnipeg, so there opening schedule could not possibly be any easier.
Four of the six teams they start against have no chance of making the Playoffs, and Washington and Dallas are unlikely to be very strong teams either.
There is still some question as to whether John Tavares will be in the lineup tomorrow, and with that comes questions about the salary cap. Truthfully, I wrote this last night and scheduled it for this morning, so those questions may already be answered.
dark. Next. Updated Top 10 Prospects List
All we know for sure is that the Leafs have to submit their opening night roster shortly and they are still (at the time of this writing) almost three million dollars over the salary cap.