The Toronto Maple Leafs played one of their best all-around games of the season on Tuesday night, defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning at home.
For the past few years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been compared to the Tampa Bay Lightning. It’s not just because they’re both blue-and-white but because the Leafs were supposed to be the next Lightning dynasty.
There’s no reason to believe that can’t happen, but as highlighted by what happened in the playoffs last year, it’s not going to happen soon.
Within the Steven Stamkos Era, the Lightning have four Stanley Cup Finals appearances, with two victories. Tampa Bay has lived up to all expectations, while the Leafs have struggled, but they’ve also had something that Toronto hasn’t had all this time: a world-class netminder.
Andrei Vasilevskiy is one of the best goaltenders of the past two decades and is quickly turning into one of the best of all-time. With him in-net, the Lightning have every opportunity to win, even if their superstars aren’t scoring, unlike the Leafs.
Toronto’s had above average goaltending at times, but they’ve never had one (or two) goalies who can stand on their head and guarantee a win. Until now?
Toronto Maple Leafs Play Best Game of the Season Against Tampa
Although the final score was 4-1, the score itself was a lot closer throughout the night. Despite the score being 2-0 and 2-1 for most of the third, Toronto dominated the ice.
They were outshooting Tampa 25-5 at one point in the game and easily could’ve been up 4-0 early. However, as I alluded to earlier, Vasilevskiy was in-net and kept the game as close as he could.
When the Leafs last played Tampa Bay at home, it was Game 7 of the First Round. Toronto had just blown a 3-2 series lead with the opportunity to win at home on Hockey Night in Canada. It felt like momentum could finally switch and this team could get over the hump, but clearly that didn’t happen.
Tuesday night’s game was an example of how Toronto should have played that night in May. They were physical, but more importantly they controlled puck possession. They barely allowed the Lightning to get high-opportunity scoring chances and played their game to perfection.
As we all know, Toronto isn’t going to bully a team to victory. Instead, they’re going to out-skill and out-work their opposition, keeping the puck in the offensive zone for as long as possible. That’s exactly what they did as the Leafs outshot Tampa Bay 40-19, while Auston Matthews was (for the most part) the best player on the ice.
Matthews scored early in the second period, which would eventually be known as the game-winning goal and the Leafs deserved to win.
Toronto gave Matt Murray an easy night, as he was the third-star, stopping 18 of 19 shots and looked pretty relaxed all night.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs can find a way to play that game four of seven times in a playoff series, they’re going to a hard team to beat. I don’t want to get too excited as the last time I did that, this team lost two games in a row, but that win was the best of the season.
Toronto will face Philadelphia in an afternoon match-up Thursday and then have a well-deserved five days off for the break.