The Toronto Maple Leafs are officially off to a great start in the 2024-25 NHL season.
After opening the season with a 47 shot effort against the Montreal Canadiens that they somehow lost 1-0 while hitting four posts, the Toronto Maple Leafs have now rattled off three straight wins.
The Leafs followed up a pretty good game against Pittsburgh on Saturday with a great game last night against LA.
The Leafs move to 3-0-1 and are fifth in the NHL and have the best winning percentage of any team in the Eastern Conference other than Tampa who have only played two games.
Toronto Maple Leafs Crush the LA Kings 6-2 + Auston Matthews Has 3 Points
The Leafs didn't look so hot at times during this game, but Anthony Stolarz bailed them out when needed for the most part, and Auston Matthews scored his first goal of the season. The Leafs won 6-2.
Incredibly, the Leafs - who really should be 4-0 - scored their first power-play goal of the season in their fourth game, and not until it was already 4-0. The media is making this into something of a concern, but it really isn't. The Leafs power-play is all but guaranteed to come around eventually and the far more important thing is 5v5, where the team is playing extremely well, winning 11-4 this season to date.
Tonight's game was difficult to review because it was 2-0 Toronto within the first ten minutes, and as soon as that happens in an NHL game, the losing team tends to have the puck a lot and destroy the winning team statistically.
It was 3-0 by the end of the period, and the Leafs were not good for most of the second but somehow made it 5-0. After that, it was all LA, and thus its hard to look at the Leafs players stat lines and get a sense of how everyone played.
Obviously we know the Domi, McMann (2 goals) and Nylander line was great, as they did the majority of the scoring, but after the game I always find it interesting to see how the players you didn't notice as much fared. Unfortunately, in a goalie assisted blow-out where the winning team wasn't exactly dominating, the stats are more or less useless.
For an example of what I mean, Chris Tanev finished the game with an 18% expected goals rating, which is BRUTAL. With Expected Goals, 49% means your losing your minutes and anything under 45% is pretty bad. Tanev, however, wasn't anywhere close to that bad. It's doubtful he could put up such numbers over any kind of larger sample size, even if he was trying to be bad on purpose - it's just that when its 5-0 and you have another 100 games to play this year if you want to win the Cup, you stop playing.
I thought the bottom six was unimpressive tonight overall. Tavares, Robertson and Holmberg wasn't doing it for me, and the Reaves line is never going to be good for obvious reasons. I was most interested to see Liljegren play, but he was used the least, didn't factor into the game too much, and wasn't really noticable. He is usually good when you don't notice him, and the coach was kind in his assessment after the game, but the stats were incredibly bad.
In Liljegren's defense, Simon Benoit and Oliver Ekman-Larsson also had bad games, and they hadn't sat out for a week. Overall, this is the kind of game great teams win - they weren't that good, but they have such great scoring that someone is always bound to be hot and they got solid goaltending.
You'd like to see an elite defenseman on this team because the floor is so high as it is, and the mixture of high-end skill with the rise of Knies/Robertson/McMann is tantalizing, but the start to the season is pretty exciting. You have to assume they'll add the obviously needed 3C eventually, but if they can somehow put together a package for an elite defenseman they'd probably be the best team in the NHL.