Toronto Maple Leafs Head into Florida to Take on Panthers

The Toronto Maple Leafs head into Florida Thursday night for their second meeting of the season against the Florida Panthers.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are trying to right the ship as they have lost five of their last ten games ( 5-4-1 ).

The Florida Panthers are on a hot streak as they try to claim one of the Wild Card spots.

The Panthers currently sit just one point behind the Pittsburgh Penguins and three points behind the New York Islanders with one game in hand after taking down 15 of their last 20 possible points.

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Florida Panthers

In their first meeting of the year the two teams had a high scoring first period that saw five goals exchanged that had the Panthers go into the first intermission with a 3-2 lead.

Just under two minutes into the second period Aleksander Barkov scored Florida’s fourth goal on just their eighth shot of the game that chased Matt Murray.  Ilya Samsonov would come in and stabilize the Maple Leafs which helped the club come back and tie the game heading into overtime where William Nylander would score a brilliant overtime winner.

Matt Murray will be back in net for the game and will look to follow-up a strong outing against the Ottawa Senators where he turned away 48 of 52 shots.

The two-time Stanley Cup champion has allowed four goals in each of his last four appearances since returning from injury in early March and four goals in six straight games if you date it back before his injury into mid-January.

Despite allowing the four goals in 22 minutes back in January against the Panthers, Murray has a career record of 5-2-0 with a 2.76 GAA and .914 save percentage against Florida.

It appears that coach Sheldon Keefe is going back to his traditional top six as Mark Masters tweeted out Wednesday that William Nylander was back on the second line with John Tavares and Michal Bunting, while Auston Matthews was able to get Mitch Marner back on his line over Alex Kerfoot.

Despite getting time on the top two lines, Kerfoot has not scored since January 17 and has just one goal since the calendar turned to 2023 giving him just one goal and nine points over his last 32 games.

Marner will look to extend his point streak to seven games as he has five goals and 13 points during that span.  The former fourth overall pick recorded his 90th point of the season on Tuesday night which is the third time he has reached that milestone and only Darryl Sittler has more 90-point seasons as a Toronto Maple Leafs.

Game time is at 7:00 PM Eastern.