Toronto Maple Leafs Lucky Not to Have Lost 5 Straight

The Toronto Maple Leafs will take on the Ottawa Senators tonight.

The Toronto Maple Leafs avoided losing their fifth game in a row on Tuesday night, against the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Leafs overcame a 4-1 lead, but optimism is in short supply because a) that was a pretty improbable comeback b) Tampa had clearly stopped trying very hard, and c) we already know that when the Leafs big guns play well and they get good goaltending, that they are unstoppable.

Their problem – right now, but not for the last couple of years – has been poor defense, zero lineup depth, and bad coaching, none of which have been addressed by the team. 

The Toronto Maple Leafs vs Ottawa Senators

The Leafs will hilariously go back to the same lineup they used the other night, the one where Ryan Reaves is still pretending to be an NHL player and where Gio and Klingberg lineup on the second pairing like its 2017.

Then again, if you thought the Leafs bad start to the season was frustrating, try being an Ottawa Senators fan.  Those guys have it rough.

They thought they were finally going to be able to catch up to the Leafs, but instead they’ve been. horrible.  Their new goalie was an indication of how bad their recently fired GM was at this job, and of course that same GM was fired for basically being an idiot and getting the team docked a draft pick.

The Senators are 4-6, but we shouldn’t be so quick to laugh.

The Leafs record consists of 3 multi-goal comebacks, and 2 games where Joseph Woll stole a win, and another game where Samsonov stole a point.

The Leafs best. player has 13 goals in 12 games, and can’t possibly get any better than he current is.  But dressing John Klingberg, Ryan Reaves, Marc Giordano, Max Domi, has prevented that amazing explosion of talent from helping the team to a better record.

By points-percentage, the Leafs are 13th overall, and Ottawa is 28th, worse though, the Leafs are 26th in Expected-Goals Percentage, while Ottawa is 28th.

These teams are getting bad results, but they deserve those results because they are playing bad.

I don’t know about Ottawa, but the Leafs brought this on themselves because it was quite clear ever since July the second  that their blue-line was too old and not physical enough.

It was clear that Domi and Klingberg and Reaves were name-brand losers whose non-name-brand equivalents could have been had for the league minimum.

It was clear immediately that hiring the GM of the Calgary Flames was just straight-up stupid.

So tonight’s game is fairly meaningless.  We have to teams going nowhere due to horrible mismanagment.  In the Leafs case at least, it’s kind of funny because they had good managment that was getting incredibly unlucky at every turn and they sabatoged themselves in order to be better percieved by people who have no clue what they’re even talking about.  (stats naturalstattrick.com).

Now, if that isn’t classic Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey, I don’t know what is.