The Toronto Maple Leafs will try to pick up where they left off before the NHL's massively successful 4 Nations Face-Off, which, as you know, Team Canada won, leaving a soulless and delusional group of American players in tears after their unlikable GM made the ridiculous and embarrassing decision to go on a disgraced news channel and politicize the whole affair.
So where were we? When last we saw the Toronto Maple Leafs, they were losing a 2-1 game to the Vancouver Canucks.
The Leafs were rumored to be getting Scott Laughton and that never panned out, then they lost a very winnable game to Vancouver, and Chris Tanev was left off Team Canada (correctly, as it turned out).
The Leafs are 3-3 in their last six, and they are three points back of the Florida Panthers. Their season continues to rest on Brad Treliving's ability to augment the team at or before the Trade Deadline. His failure to do so last year is considered on par with the worst actions any Leafs GM has ever committed.
Matthews Is Over-Due
Auston Matthews went to the 4 Nations Face-Off on a six game goalless streak, then proceeded to go goalless for the entire tournament (that isn't to say that he didn't play well, he did).
I don't know how many times Auston Matthews has gone without a goal for ten games in his life, but I'm guessing it's not that many. The crazy thing is that he hasn't played badly at all. He's taken 33 shots and probably close to 70 shot-attempts since he last scored.
It appears that Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner will both be in tonight's lineup. The Leafs will start Anthony Stolarz and use Joseph Woll tomorrow against the Blackhawks.
Auston Matthews isn't guaranteed to score, but you'd think he practically is because going ten games without scoring is one of the most unusual things we've seen this season.
The Hurricanes are a great team and were already better than the Leafs before adding Mikko Rantanen, which is just a ridiculous in-season addition. If the Hurricanes had better goaltending, they'd easily be in first place overall as, not only do they probably have the NHL's best roster, but they also have the NHL's best advanced stats.
If the Hurricanes were getting the kind of goaltending the Leafs have gotten this year they'd likely be setting all sorts of NHL records - they are that good.
The final thing I want to mention tonight is that Alex Steeves has been promoted and demoted at the same time. Promoted in the sense that he was called up to the NHL, but demoted in the sense that he's on a 60 goal pace and the Leafs are putting him on the fourth line with their worst players.
Once again, the Leafs lineup looks brutal after the top two lines - apperently they did not use the break to re-consider their extremely misguided strategy of not splitting up their three franchise players. This is dumb, but putting Steeves on a line with Kampf and Lorentz is worse.