The Toronto Maple Leafs are in a knife fight for first place in the Atlantic and things could go either way.
The goal for the Toronto Maple Leafs needs to be to win the Stanley Cup and unfortunately that can only happen if they win their division, making the rest of the regular season into a bizarre kind of pre-playoff playoffs.
In order for the Leafs to get it done and win their first ever Atlantic title (they previously only won the division when it was all-Canadian during the Pandemic) I have some advice.
The first part of this advice was going to be to split up Marner and Nylander and Matthews and play them on separate lines, and my second piece of advice was going to be to play Max Domi on the first line with Auston Matthews.
Craig Berube did both of those things last night. He also healthy-scratched David Kampf and the Leafs previously demoted Ryan Reaves, so my top four ideas have already been implimneted, which I think is great. I still have a few more though, so check em out:
Some things I think the Toronto Maple Leafs should do to win the Atlantic
Alex Steeves - the Leafs have a guy pacing over 50 goals in the AHL and he needs to be in the NHL. Steeves would have a hard time breaking into the top-six any time soon, but he could add a ton of NHL size and scoring to the fourth line.
A fourth line that features Pontus Holmberg centring Nick Robertson and Alex Steeves could be a great source of energy and depth scoring for the Leafs in the playoffs. Lorentz is fine but more suited to being the extra forward on a top team, and the Leafs have dressed one of the worst and most expensive fourth lines in the NHL all season. This would be a breath of fresh air.
A second piece of advice I have for the Leafs is to start giving more offensive zone faceoffs to their best players. Auston Matthews has missed a large portion of the season so we need to look at Marners numbers to get an idea of how the Leafs deploy their stars: so far this year Nathan MacKinnon has taken over 200 more 5v5 offensize zone faceoffs than Marner, but Marner only has six fewer 5v5 points.
The reason this has happened is because Domi/Robertson on the third line needed to be sheltered in order to be effective. The new-look lines won't have this problem, so this should get automatically corrected if they stick with the lineup from last night. Getting Marner and Matthews a few extra ozone faceoffs every game will go a long way to re-establishing the Leafs as a top 5v5 scoring team.
Finally, my last piece of advice is to stop using Auston Matthews on the penalty kill. The PK's effectiveness comes down to the goalies, so I don't think the tiny upgrade Matthews offers on the PK is worth the several 5v5 minutes it costs hiim every game to do so.
Matthews PK efforts will help the Leafs a lot more if that energy and skill is channeled into extra minutes at 5v5 where he makes the most difference.
If the Leafs do these things they will win the Atlantic Division.