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Sheldon Keefe addressed the media after his team’s 3-2 overtime loss to the Vancouver Canucks that dropped the Leafs’ record to 28-12-5 on the season.


On Zach Hyman’s status, and his thoughts on Alex Edler’s knee-on-knee hit that knocked Hyman out of the game:

We will find out more tomorrow, and my opinion doesn’t matter.

On what stood out about Vancouver’s effort:

I don’t know. Their goalie made 10 point-blank saves.

On the Robertson – Tavares – Nylander line:

I thought they were okay. Especially early in the game, they had lots of jump — not just on Willy’s goal, but Robertson had a number of really good looks and chances. The shots just didn’t fall for him. I thought the line looked good.

I changed it in the third for a bit there mainly just because of the matchups and trying to protect the lead, but I went back to it once it was tied again.

On the new defense pairings — Rielly-Holl & Muzzin-Brodie:

I would have to watch back on video, but I don’t think it was in any way a factor in the game today.

On the decision to mix up the pairings:

We have been talking about it for a couple of months now, to be honest. Really, probably since the offseason, we have been talking about using different looks. We put Brodie with Rielly to start the season, and we liked that. We like Muzzin-Holl, of course. Brodie is a new player for us, and we haven’t tried anything else.  With injuries and such, you thought it might force you to change it up at different times. It hasn’t happened for us that way.

We have been talking about it. We just thought that we had a couple of days between games. We had a practice yesterday and were able to get them to practice that way together. We just wanted to get a look at it. We don’t know what is going to happen for us. We just think it makes sense to get people comfortable playing with different people.