The Toronto Maple Leafs played the Buffalo Sabres last night and things got uglly.
Specifically, beseiged Toronto Maple Leafs goalie, and hockey pool saboteur, Ilya Samsonov let in a goal from about 50 feet that my mom could have saved, and things just got worse from there.
In what has to easily be the worst Leafs game of the season, the final score was Buffalo 9 Toronto 3.
William Nylander did score a pretty sweet goal, and Auston Matthews added another one, but that was all the excitement for the Leafs tonight.
The Toronto Maple Leafs Get Completely Destroyed
The only good thing you can say about this game is that it didn't happen on home ice. The Leafs were terrible, allowing three goals per period.
You can blame Samsonov - and he was horrendous - but the Leafs didn't really give him much of a chance. At 5v5, Buffalo scored 7 goals and scoring chances were 27-14 in their favour.
Dangerous chances were 12-5 Buffalo, meaning that they almost had as many great chances as the Leafs had regular ones.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were horrible in this game, and have now lost two in a row, after going nearly a month with just the single regulation loss. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).
The Leafs have been playing with fire all year, relying on improbable comebacks and an unsustaibably lucky record in one-goal games, and to be honest, it's a shock we haven't seen more games like this this year.
The Leafs looked like a team whose best defenseman are old and whose other defenseman are not NHL players. The Max Domi line was dominated so thoroughly I doubt we will ever see the combo of Robertson-Domi-Jarnkrok again.
The only positive take away from tonight's game is that the Auston Matthes, William Nylander, Matthew Knies line was excellent. Hard to believe, but in a 9-3 game, the Leafs first line was more or less dominant.
The Toronto Maple Leafs will play one more game before the actual break - Columbus on Saturday (which is just horrible scheduling by the NHL - the Leafs and Saturday night are a tradition and far too many times this year we're getting crap games like Nashville and Columbus on Saturdays).
Based on how they played tonight, I will be curious what kind of lineup they dress for that game. It is possible Ilya Samsonov gets sent to the AHL, because he looks lost out there.
Bottom line, this game was terrible, and as good as the Penguins game was last week, this is equally bad. Hard to get a read on this team, but they appear to me to be significantly worse than their record would suggest.