Are Matt Murray and Ilya Samsonov good enough to lead the Toronto Maple Leafs to a Stanley Cup this season?
It’s mid-April and the Toronto Maple Leafs are about to start the playoffs. Are you confident in the combination of Matt Murray and Ilya Samsonov to get you to June?
Here’s the thing about Murray that we sometimes forget. He’s a two-time Stanley Cup winner and has proved that he’s a big-game goalie. However, a lot has happened in his career and life since then.
He’s gone through the ups and downs of being a professional goaltender and at one point was on waivers, with an unknown future of whether he’d be a number-one again. Despite the past, in 14 games thus far, I think Murray has lived up to every expectation and has won the fans over.
But we’ve seen this before.
Jack Campbell didn’t have the resume of Murray, but we saw an NHL All-Star netminder who broke a record for consecutive wins to start a season fall apart out of nowhere. Not only that, but we saw Freddie Andersen, who was also an All-Star, falter down the stretch and ultimately fail in the biggest games.
I’m not saying that Murray is going to be that player, but the past hasn’t been welcomed to Leafs goalies in the spring.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Need Good , Not Great, Goaltending to Win Stanley Cup
When the Leafs traded for Murray and signed Samsonov, the hope was for Murray to be the 1A and Samsonov to be the 1B, but it was still an open-competition.
With one-year left on his contract, I think the Leafs would prefer that Murray is their starter in the playoffs, to justify walking away from Samsonov, instead of having to make an offseason decision on signing him/trading Murray.
Over the past few games, it hasn’t been all roses for the Leafs netminders. In four of the past five combined starts, the goalies have allowed three or more goals four times, not exactly playing their best hockey.
But, the biggest takeaway from those five games is that they won three of them. Being able to secure a .600 winning percentage despite playing below average hockey should give this team a ton of confidence, as they head into the New Year and try to make some noise in the playoffs.
At this point in the season, we’ve seen more than enough from both goalies to know that they’re capable of winning. We don’t know if that will translate to winning playoff games for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but there aren’t much better options at this point and the team isn’t going to move assets for a goalie, especially when they have two number-one’s for $6.4M.
It sucks that an 82-game sample size isn’t enough to determine whether or not the season was successful, but that’s the nature of the beast. Let’s hope both goalies can get hot at the right time of the year and give us something to cheer for, for more than seven playoff games this year.