The Toronto Maple Leafs played their best game of the year on Saturday night, defeating the Pittsburgh Penguins 7-2 on the road.
If you're GM Brad Treliving, this is the game you've been dreaming about all season. All four lines were rolling, the defense chipped in with some points, while their goalie stopped 35 of 37 shots. On a back-to-back, the Leafs were bound to allow some scoring chances to a resurging Penguins team, but Dennis Hildeby was up for the challenge.
For the first time all year, it felt like every player fit into place perfectly and Craig Berube finally coached this team to how they are supposed to play. If you look at ice-time, Matthew Knies led all forwards with 20:17 TOI, while no other forward played over 20 minutes. The team received some important depth scoring from Dakota Joshua, Nic Roy, Nick Robertson and Bobby McMann, but it's actually the top-six we should talk about in more depth.
Maybe it's because he only played 27 seconds of short-handed hockey and played over 5 minutes of power-play time, but Auston Matthews looked like his old self. Over the past few years, Matthews has been given a bigger role defensively, which is what has seemingly hurt him offensively, so watching the captain back in a primarily offensive role was great.
Auston Matthews looked incredible against Pittsburgh
It's important that your best players are good at all aspects of the game, but I've never once agreed with Matthews playing penalty-kill as that's what the likes of Nic Roy and Dakota Joshua are for. If you want the ability to create offense from blocking a shot on the penalty-kill, then throw someone like Nick Robertson into that role instead and see what he can do, but your star forward who can score 60 goals in a season should be rested and ready for 5v5 and power-play time.
Since Berube finally figured that out, it resulted in Matthews' best overall game of the year. He only compiled four shots but he had eight shot attempts, with a few of them being big slap-shots. His shot speed has been worrisome all year, but he looked like the Hart Trophy winning version of himself on Saturday night, which is an aspiring thought for the Leafs the rest of the way.
One win doesn't change the season but it should give us all hope as this team gets ready for a hard stretch of hockey. Toronto's next seven games are all against playoff contender teams: Florida, Carolina, Montreal, Tampa Bay, San Jose, Edmonton, Chicago and Washington.
This team is getting healthy at the right time, so let's hope that Saturday night's win wasn't a flash-in-the-pan and this is the style of hockey we'll be seeing for the rest of the year.