The Toronto Maple Leafs are winners of seven of their last ten games.
Somehow, that doesn't seem possible, but the Toronto Maple Leafs are getting it done despite having no goalies, no consistancy, no depth, barely any blue-line and no Morgan Rielly.
In fact, the Leafs have won both their game since Rielly was suspended - a great one vs St. Louis and a bad one (for everyone except Auston Matthews) against the Flyers.
Tonightn is a gimme against the sad-sack Might Ducks and potential future Leafs goalie John Gibson. But this is the Leafs we are talking about, so who knows if they will actually take the gimme.
Toronto Maple Leafs vs Anaheim Mighty Ducks
Emilio!
The Leafs will be icing a weird lineup tonight as John Tavares is out with an injury (as of yet undisclosed), Mark Giordano on the berevement list, and Morgan Rielly remains injured.
Also, despite this being a major embarssment to the team and an indictment of Brad Treliving's managerial skills, Martin Jones is once again starting in net.
It is extremely frustrating for fans of this team to watch the team repeatadly start bad goalies in a season in which they should be trying to win the division and give themselves a reasonable path to the Stanley Cup.
Instead, the Leaf arguably do not even have an NHL goalie on their roster. Starting Martin Jones is ridiculous. It's one thing to have to do it in an emergancy, but this team has been having a goalie emergancy for three months.
Max Domi, who any other team would be sitting out or waiving, is promoted to second line centre for tonight.
After an atrocious game in which the Flyers had 15 scoring chance to the Leafs 3 with Brodie and Liljegren on the ice, the Leafs will go back to that top pairing.
They will dress a third pairing of William Lageson and Max Lajoie.
Even the Ducks are probaby offended by how bad of a roster the Leafs are dressing tonight.
But no matter, one of the fun things about having Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner on the team is that you can usually win just about any game where you get even half-decent goaltending.
As long as the Leafs star players show up tonight, beating the Ducks - who are awful - should be pretty easy. Still, this isn't a roster that reflects well on the team's GM who is still missing in action.