Boston Bruins Will Ruin Toronto Maple Leafs Season…Again
The Toronto Maple Leafs are not as good as we think they are.
Why do the Toronto Maple Leafs have to lose to the only team we want them to beat?
With Auston Matthews out and the next nine days off, the Leafs lost to the Bruins 5-2 at home. This was the type of game that was supposed to spring them into vacation with a smile, but instead, left the fanbase sour.
I know that Matthews was out but the defense, including Ilya Samsonov didn’t do a good enough job to get the win. Right when the Leafs got back into the game with a Calle Jarnkrok goal, the Bruins scored two relatively quick goals and ended the game.
The Bruins and Leafs have been tied together since 2013, but they’re not necessarily rivals. A rivalry is something that has a push-and-pull. It goes back-and-forth and is usually a coin-flip towards who’s actually going to win that night.
So, you may think that the Leafs and Bruins are rivals, but they’re really not. They’re two teams that play each other hard but Boston always win.
Like, always.
The same thing can be applied to Toronto vs. Ottawa.
The “Battle of Ontario” isn’t really a rivalry because the Senators have never beaten the Leafs in the playoffs. Toronto has dominated them in the sam fashion that Boston has beaten Toronto, so when Leafs fans look at Ottawa, they don’t look at them as rivals, but instead as the little brother who they beat every time it means something.
Toronto Maple Leafs Head Into All-Star Break With Disappointing Loss
Toronto has defeated Boston this year, but overall they’re 1-2 against them on the season. The Leafs are third in the NHL in points, but for whatever reason, I feel disappointed and upset that they lost the only game that seemed to matter.
Samsonov, who’s been brilliant in net, looked fatigued and worn-down. After seven straight starts, he had his worst game at home for the season. It’s kind of ironic that he played his worst game in his seventh straight start, because that would suggest that the same thing could happen in April.
When the Leafs have lost to Boston in Game 7’s in the past, the goalie has typically fallen on their face and has allowed a lot of goals that night.
If this were Game 7 of the playoffs, a Samsonov performance would have fit perfectly in the history of the Leafs and as per usual, the team would have lost to the Bruins in the biggest game of the year.
Predicting what will happen in April based off a game in January isn’t a fair comparison, but it’s something to look at. The Bruins are now 13 points ahead of Toronto in the standings, but a regulation win would have put them only down nine with 30 games remaining.
Although it seems unlikely that Toronto will catch Boston in the standings, whether it was 13 or nine points, that win could have given them a lot of momentum for the second-half of the season.
A little hope would have been nice, but as I look to the future, the only thing I see is another disappointing loss to the Bruins because they are stacked. Their top-two centre’s make a combined $3M, so that flexibility has given them so much depth that makes them look unstoppable.
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We’ll see what happens moving forward, but that loss really put a damper on the team heading into the break.