Toronto Maple Leafs New Lines Could Make Them Unstoppable

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been experimenting with new lines over the past few weeks and may have just found the best combination.

Throughout Sheldon Keefe’s tenure as the head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, he hasn’t done anything too unique. For the most part, John Tavares and/or Auston Matthews will play with either Mitch Marner and/or William Nylander with a hard-working player on the other wing.

It hasn’t be a complicated system because it’s clearly worked. The combination of Marner and Matthews helped Matthews win his first Hart Trophy and second Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy last year. Although they had a great season, Marner moved alongside Tavares and has now helped him have his best season since the two were first paired together in the 2018-19 season.

Matthews isn’t quite having an MVP season like he did last year, but all four players are above a point-per-game rate and will have 30-goal seasons. Nylander, Matthews and Tavares have already reached the 30-goal mark, while Marner is only four goals away, however he 10 more points than the second best player on the Leafs thus far.

With four 30-goal scorers on the roster, they’ve all obviously benefited from playing alongside each other, but maybe it would be best if they didn’t every night. That’s the latest philosophy that Keefe has tried and it clearly worked on Saturday night against Ottawa.

Toronto Maple Leafs Should Continue to Experiment With Lone-Wolf Matthews

Calle Jarnkrok and Alex Kerfoot have been two players who have seen some heat this year, with Kerfoot’s hate justified much more than Jarnkrok.

At $3.5M, you’d expect Kerfoot to be more than a seven-goal, 28 point player at this point. Although he’s not scoring at a pace we’d expect, he’s still impacting the game in a positive manner most nights, as he’s creating a lot of chances.

Those chances unfortunately haven’t translated to goals, as Kerfoot is one of the most snake-bitten players on the Leafs roster, so his $3.5M contract seems like an overpayment at the moment.

As for Jarnkrok, he just hit his career-high in goals and points and as Matthews said after Saturday night’s win in Ottawa, has “one of the prettiest releases I’ve seen in a long time.” Jarnkrok’s shot was the first thing I noticed about him when he joined Toronto and that type of shot could lead to many more goals if he’s stuck playing with Matthews.

Speaking of which, the trio of Kerfoot-Matthews-Jarnkrok combined for two goals and three assists on Saturday and should continue to play together because of that. I know a one-game sample size isn’t a lot to suggest they should start in the playoffs together, but another successful franchise had a similar line model during their run.

The Pittsburgh Penguins were famous for spreading the love during their back-to-back Stanley Cup wins, especially with the three-pack of: Conor Sheary-Sidney Crosby-Patric Hornqvist, Chris Kunitz-Evgeni Malkin-Bryan Rust and Carl Hagelin-Nick Bonino-Phil Kessel.

By having Crosby, Malkin and Kessel on three different lines, it gave the Penguins three legit scoring weapons every night. The Toronto Maple Leafs can now do the same by having Kerfoot-Matthews-Jarnkrok, Bunting-Tavares-Marner and then Lafferty-O’Reilly and Nylander.

The team will obviously go back to a stacked-roster in crunch time, but the three-headed monster gives them a much more balanced line-up and depth, which was something they were missing a month ago.