Mo-mentum Drives the Toronto Maple Leafs
The Toronto Maple Leafs, like many other teams, seem to build on their recent success. In other words, once they get some momentum going they’re very hard to stop. This season, they’ve won 3-or-more consecutive games 6 times already, while suffering only a pair of 3-or-more-game losing streaks.
Looking back to last season, the Leafs had 7 winning streaks (including a 7-gamer) and only 4 losing streaks. If we go back even further, to the 2022-2023 season, we see that Toronto had 5 winning streaks and only a single losing streak.
So, what does this mean? What I read into it is that the Toronto Maple Leafs like to have fun, and everyone knows that winning is fun. When guys like Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews are having fun, they’re more likely to use their incredible skill levels to try something new that ends up with a puck in the opponent’s net.
When William Nylander is having fun, he plays with more energy, creates more scoring chances with his strong skating, and scores more goals. When Joseph Woll is in the midst of a great stretch of games, seemingly stopping everything, it instills more confidence, which leads to even more great play.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing great hockey, the home crowd (as well as the significant numbers of Leaf Nation present at road games) really gets into it, and the players feed off the crowd’s positivity.
These points are applicable to any team, of course, but I think that the “momentum factor” might play an outsized role with a team constructed as the Toronto Maple Leafs are. Their individual top-end offensive talent exceeds that of most teams, and they clearly like to have fun.
Most coaches preach a “one game at a time” philosophy, but expanding that thinking into trying to consciously build winning streaks could prove beneficial.