The Maple Leafs dominated the run of play from the puck drop but needed a third-period comeback on Tuesday night versus the Winnipeg Jets.
They managed just that in a highly-entertaining contest featuring nine goals, 36 penalty minutes, and 64 hits. With the win, the Leafs have reclaimed the third divisional playoff spot for the time being, currently one point ahead of both Florida (who have one game in hand) and Boston (even on games).
Your game in ten:
1. With a 69.5% share of the shot attempts, this was the Leafs‘ best possession game of the season. They took full advantage of a Jets blue line that was missing Jacob Trouba, Tyler Myers and Tobias Enstrom with a good four-line effort across the board. They also owned 75% of the scoring chances by Natural Stat Trick‘s count — again, their best performance of the season in that category.
2. Josh Leivo’s added step in his skating — a product of many Barb Underhill sessions in his practice time, no doubt — is really visible when he’s chasing down pucks on forecheck; he’s arriving on time now and it’s giving him ample opportunities to put his big frame and skill down low to good use. On the opening goal by Leo Komarov just a minute into the game, he got inside on Ben Chiarot and handily beat him to the loose puck. He followed that up with a skilled play on the halfwall to send Nazem Kadri in alone for Kadri’s second-period goal.
Leivo is a hungry, “dialled-in” player at the moment; he’s all over the ice and making an impact nearly every shift. Two assists and a four-shot night give him eight points and 18 shots on goal in his last five games. He’s gone from playing 10 or 11 minutes in his first five games of the season to 16:19 TOI tonight (second-highest TOI of his young NHL career).
That trio with Komarov and Kadri has become a formidable cycle line that is heavy, skilled, and chippy. I wouldn’t be moving away from it anytime soon. Sometimes a player makes up the coach’s mind for him and that’s definitely the case with Leivo at the moment; this is not a player who should be playing fewer than 14 or 15 minutes right now, and that means a tough decision is in store for Mike Babcock if Mitch Marner returns soon.
3. Someone has to sit and someone has to move to the fourth line among Josh Leivo, Nikita Soshnikov, and Connor Brown. The first thought that comes to mind is moving Brown to L4 with Marner back in his spot next to Bozak and JVR, while Soshnikov either sits for a few games or rejoins the Marlies. Zach Hyman’s spot should be in consideration here, too. If Babcock rather not move Brown down to L4 (he’s got 14 goals, after all), it’s not hard to picture Leivo making an impact next to Matthews and Nylander; Leivo likes his off (left) wing and he has certainly staked more of a claim to a top-nine role than Hyman has in terms of his offensive results.
4. Nazem Kadri has become the heartbeat of this club in terms of bringing his team into the fight and ratcheting up the emotional intensity when necessary. The Jets were looking to shove the Leafs around in this game, and Kadri was eager and willing to push back, including a couple of scrums and an awesome hit on Chiarot where he launched himself into the Leaf bench.
Kadri continues to do it all in what has been a supremely impressive 60 games to date — tough minutes, key goals, big hits, occasional fights, few easy nights for the opposition’s top players, and a refusal to back down from anybody. Kadri has never hesitated to tangle with opponents that – for a sub-200 pound man — should invoke the flight rather than the fight response. Tonight it was Dustin Byfuglien; in the past, it’s been David Backes or Zack Kassian, among others. That kind of spirit is contagious and it seems particularly valuable on such a young team. The team’s overall response to the Jets’ strong-arm approach was encouraging, and Kadri was at the center of it from the Leaf perspective.
Kadri has also now hit the 25-goal mark for the first time in his career just 59 games into the campaign.
5. The second chapter of the Patrik Laine vs. Auston Matthews storyline was again a back-and-forth, shot-for-shot heavyweight battle involving multi-point games from both parties, but Matthews scored the knockout punch this time around. Matthews’ line had a far better night in the possession game and it was Auston’s slick pass — with Big Buff bearing down on him to boot — that set up Jake Gardiner for the game-winner in OT. That was Matthews’ third assist of the night after his half-intentional ricochet off of the end boards found William Nylander to tie the game in the third on the powerplay, and he grabbed a secondary assist on Leo Komarov’s powerplay goal in the second.
In a big game for the Leafs with the spotlight shining brightly on #34 in particular, Matthews again seized the moment (much like the Centennial Classic).
6. It also could’ve been a much different story if Matthews didn’t get some help from the Leafs‘ penalty kill at the start of overtime, with Matthews in the box for a hook on Nikolaj Ehlers near the end of regulation. With Laine sitting on two goals — and having already scored a hat trick-clinching game-winner in overtime versus the Leafs earlier this season — many Leafs fans were no doubt thinking that they knew how this movie was going to end, but the Leafs didn’t give up a shot on goal in 1:35 of 4v3 time. Leo Komarov got his stick in the lane on an attempt to set up the Laine one-timer, Morgan Rielly dug the puck out behind the net and skated the puck out of danger, and Matt Hunwick did a good job of containing Laine off the rush near the end of the kill.
7. This was one of those truly rare occasions wherein the starting goalie went the distance, posted a .800 save percentage (16 saves on 20 shots), and still picked up a win. It looks bad for Frederik Andersen lately — he’s a .878 over his eights starts since the All-Star Break — but, as far as tonight was concerned, I didn’t think the scoreline after 40 minutes was on him in a significant way. The goals included a wicked one-timer on a cross-slot pass to an elite shooter (afforded too much breathing room by Zaitsev), a tip-in, a deflection on a shot going wide from Laine in acres of space in the mid-slot, and a rebound powerplay goal where he had little chance of clinging onto his initial save (after a Byfuglien blast along the ice) with a mass of bodies right on his doorstep. Andersen stepped up with a couple of key saves in the third to send the game to overtime. In short, it wasn’t as bad as .800 looks.
8. Frederik Gauthier replaced the oft-maligned Ben Smith as the fourth-line centerman for the Leafs tonight. That line, as a whole, looked a lot better than it had in recent outings. Smith — a healthy scratch tonight — has struggled at 5v5 since coming back from injury and was not offering much on the penalty kill, either, specifically on faceoffs.
There has been much debate surrounding the value of faceoffs recently, but one area where they are incontrovertibly important is on the penalty kill in the defensive zone. Gauthier went 60% on the dot on the penalty kill in the d-zone tonight, and 54% overall.
Outside of the faceoff circle, the fourth line was hungry and hard on pucks, while still making some skilled’ish plays off the cycle and in transition off the wall (a decent centerman can do that for a line). It will be hard for the Leafs to send The Goat anywhere if he continues to play like this, given the other current options.
9. With a two-point night, Jake Gardiner is now just one shy of his career high in points set in both 2013-14 and 2015-16 (31). At game #59, he is also one goal shy of his career-high in goals set in 2013-14 (10). This is also the first season in which Gardiner is on pace to finish as a plus player, and it’s not close (currently +20 after years of -23, -15 and -4, not that it means a whole lot). Gardiner now has five points (two goals, three assists) in his last two games, which is his best pair of consecutive performances offensively over his career.
Tonight was also Gardiner’s second overtime game-winner of the season, having scored the deciding goal at 3v3 against Pittsburgh just before Christmas.
The bad news is that Gardiner lost his regular defensive partner, Connor Carrick, to the dressing room after Carrick appeared to sustain an upper-body injury on a hit from Mathieu Perreault ten minutes into the first period. Gardiner spent a good chunk of his even-strength shifts alongside Roman Polak the rest of the way. From the sounds of Babcock’s quote after the game, Carrick is expected to miss some time.
Perhaps Alexey Marchenko can step in, make his mark and take on some of the load right away, but we’re likely to see Polak move into top-four minutes for the time being. It will be a test for a blue line group that, for all of its flaws, did appear to have a consistently reliable, play-driving second pairing in Gardiner-Carrick.
10. Two more powerplay points for William Nylander — his assist was prettier than his goal — brings him up to 19 PP points this season, which is just a little outside the top 10 in the NHL and on par with the likes of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Vladimir Tarasenko. He’s also way down in 142nd in the league in total powerplay minutes (137:50). That leaves Nylander first in the entire NHL in PP points per 60 (8.69).
After his set-up on Komarov’s goal tonight, Nylander’s 10 primary PP assists also now rank him second league-wide behind only Joe Pavelski. He’s moved the needle for the Leafs powerplay (the second-worst unit in the league last year) in a huge way.
Game Flow
Shot Attempts Heatmap
