The Toronto Maple Leafs Win Their Most Impressive Victory of the Season

It's not every day you can almost blow a four goal lead and be happy with the results, but that's where the Toronto Maple Leafs find themselves on this fine day.

The Toronto Maple Leafs took on the Florida Panthers last night and moved as close to getting home-ice advantage in round one of the playoffs as they've been for months.

The Leafs were drastically outplayed in the third period and almost did one of their patented huge blown leads, but they held on and picked up two points.

The fact that the Leafs were even in this game, let alone winning it, was impressive enough. There are times to be concerned with holding leads, but this wasn't one of them.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Win Their Most Impressive Victory of the Season

The Florida Panthers are one of the NHL's best teams. Their forwards might not be as impressive as the Leafs are, but they have significantly better team defense, goaltending and a way, way better blue-line than the Leafs do.

Should these teams meat in the playoffs, which seems likely, the result will be a coinflip (assuming both teams are healthy). Last year Florida won, but the Leafs didn't play badly, they were just goalied.

This year's Leafs team is worse, and Florida is better than they were, but the difference between the two is still not large.

Except for last night. The Leafs were without Marner, Jarnkrok, Rielly, Liljegren, and Edmundson.

That's two of their best penalty-killers, their second best player, and their two best defenseman. Edmundson doesn't really hurt the team by being injured, because he's one of the NHL's worst players, but that is still half of their starting defenseman out of the lineup.

So the fact that the Leafs won this game is incredibly impressive. They are now 2-0 playing without about half their team.

The Leafs built a huge 5-1 lead on the back of two Auston Matthews goals and a breakaway from Nick Robertson who has three goals in his last five games.

The coach ultimately benched the rookie line in the third period, which led to some bizarre over-use of Ryan Reaves (who shouldn't be playing, even with this shortened lineup). Of course he talked pre-game about throwing them into hard situations, so I'm not really sure what benching them accomplishes but I'm sure they feel properly chastised.

Matthews is now up to 62 goals, Nylander failed to register a point, so remains at 95 points. Hard to believe he likely scores 100 points in a season before Marner does it (though Marner has had some rough luck in that department).

The win moves the Leafs to within four points of Florida with a game in hand. They have also played one less game than Boston and are six points back of them for the Atlantic Division Title.