co-written by Alex Drain and Alec Brownscombe

The Maple Leafs mustered just one goal again in a 3-1 defeat to the Minnesota Wild to bump them out of first place in the Atlantic. 

With two top-six injuries weighing on their forward corps and a low-event, defensively oriented Minnesota team across the way, the Leafs struggled to gain traction offensively for much of the contest. They ceded two goals in the first period, one on the power play, which proved too big a hole to dig out of against the league’s best road team.

It’s a third straight defeat in which they’ve scored one goal and the fifth time they’ve scored one or fewer in the last eight games.

Your game in 10:

1.    This was a pretty dull and defensive game right from the hop. One of the Leafs‘ few sparks of energy and offensive catalysts in the early going was Nick Robertson, who played a strong opening period attacking the net on multiple shifts. On one of those shifts, he got the puck off the wall, cut to the slot, spun, and shot it just wide. The Leafs then retrieved the puck, and Max Pacioretty set Robertson back up for a look in the slot, one of his three shots on goal.

Trade deadline season is around the corner, and sizable contingents of scouts from around the league are in the building this time of year, with only 11 games remaining before the March 7 deadline due to the Four Nations break in mid-February. Robertson remains in that murky area where even when he was playing well, he was trusted with just 10 minutes and change of ice time tonight, and his goal in Montreal is his only point in his last eight games. His status on the future playoff roster remains an open question, but if his future resides elsewhere, it wasn’t a bad little showcase performance in front of a big scouting audience (ANA, COL, DAL, EDM, LA, MTL, NYR, PHI x2, PIT x2, STL, UTAH, VGK, WPG, per Terry Koshan).


2.    The Wild nearly created a breakaway in the first few minutes, but good recovery defense from Philippe Myers snuffed out the opportunity. Minnesota didn’t wait long to open the scoring, though, as Toronto conceded the first goal on home ice for the fifth time in the last eight games.

Morgan Rielly went to pick up a loose puck after the Wild lost the handle on the cycle, but he was nowhere near hard enough on the puck under pressure on his backside from Minnesota’s Jakub Lauko. Lauko shoved Rielly off the puck and pinned him against the boards before sending a pass to the net-front area, where the puck went through Holmberg. Marat Khusnutdinov quickly fired it into the net through Joseph Woll before Woll could read the pass out front and get himself properly set.

The Leafs are now down 37-33 in Rielly’s 5v5 minutes this year, one of the worst GF% numbers at that strength among regulars on the team, and he’s been outscored 3-1 since joining a pairing with Jake McCabe four games ago. Remarkably, Rielly has also now gone three games without a shot on goal.

The question for the Leafs‘ coaching staff to assess is whether splitting up Tanev and McCabe is serving to buoy their top two pairings well enough or if it’s just made both pairings middling or worse (OEL-Tanev is up 4-1 over these four games, FWIW). A big part of the divide and conquer approach centers around getting Rielly going offensively with McCabe as his partner while OEL-Tanev take on more of the toughest matchups; Rielly going three games without a shot (minus-four) while getting scored on by the Wild’s fourth line is not the way this was drawn up.


3.     Minnesota doubled their lead later in the first period on the power play after David Kämpf was tagged with an offensive-zone tripping minor on Ryan Hartman. They made it 2-0 immediately off the faceoff.

Joel Eriksson Ek won the faceoff back to Jared Spurgeon, who walked the line and then released a wrist shot into a column of bodies. Auston Matthews was initially caught up in traffic when trying to get out to front the shot; given he was still standing at the hashmark when the puck arrived, the decision to try to swat the puck down — it was a “throw your body in the shot lane properly or get out of the way,” sort of deal — was a perplexing one, even if it was something of an unthinking split-second reaction. It wound up as basically an own goal.

The Leafs have now been outscored 25-21 in the first period on home ice, where the team is cooling off considerably after starting the season 14-4-0 at Scotiabank Arena (5-7-0 in their last 12 at home). Struggling with offensive confidence and injuries to a pair of top-six forwards, coming out relatively flat and putting themselves in a 2-0 hole against the NHL’s best road team certainly wasn’t the desired first-period formula for the Maple Leafs.


4.    The first shift of the second period was better from the Leafs’ top guys. After a subdued first period, the Matthews, Mitch Marner, and Bobby McMann line generated a strong shift that provided energy and tried to get Toronto going in the period. A little more juice was visible in the team’s legs, and they followed it up with a decent fourth-line shift that included a Ryan Reaves deflection chance around the net (leading to some post-whistle physicality).

The Leafs then went to their first (and only) power play of the game at 4:40 of the second period. Ryan Hartman was called for high sticking, so Toronto’s modified five-forward top unit went to work.

Matthews lost the draw clean for an immediate clearance, which has been a more common sight this season on the man advantage. The Leafs have gone from seventh in the league to 15th in faceoff percentage on the power play overall, and Matthews, in particular, has gone from 63.9% — top 10 in the league among those with more than 50 power-play faceoffs taken last season — to just 50% this season. In addition to his ability to generate offense from the inside this season, it’s another area where the Leafs miss John Tavares. Starting with the puck in-zone versus an immediate clearance that makes the power-play go 200 feet and back makes a big difference in power-play outcomes.

Matthews’ stick shattered when the Leafs set the zone 30 seconds in, leading to a turnover, which all but burned the first minute of the opportunity. A Pacioretty turnover, one okay McMann look from the left circle, and a blocked Marner half-wall shot were all that came of a 1:51 shift for the top unit.


5.    By the midway point of the game, the Leafs generated just 0.86 expected goals for at five-on-five. Minnesota is a robust defensive team, particularly at 5v5 (their PK is actually a major weakness — not that you’d know it from the one Leafs PP), but it was not the offensive spark or presence you wanted to see from the Leafs coming off of back-to-back one-goal performances. A chunk of their issues are certainly personnel-related, as the absence of Tavares seriously hurts, as does Matthew Knies — two players who happen to be among the best at creating offense on the interior of the offensive zone, an area where the Leafs are currently struggling.

It also underscores the team’s issues with depth scoring. Of the 12 forwards in the lineup tonight, seven have five goals or fewer on the season. If the three healthy stars (Marner, Matthews, Nylander) weren’t on the ice, the Leafs didn’t have much going on whatsoever, outside of the aforementioned moments from Robertson. Per Natural Stat Trick, Toronto’s third and fourth lines combined generated just 0.37 expected goals for at 5v5 and played just 10:45 combined.


6.     The Leafs did get some chances at five-on-five with the big guns on the ice, although not enough of them given their reliance on them tonight — nearly 24 minutes for Marner and Nylander and 22 for Matthews.

Nylander went on his 13th breakaway of the season in the second period when Minnesota defenseman Declan Chisholm failed to keep the puck at the line in the offensive zone. Nylander chose shot — near side — and ripped it off the iron.

Matthews also rang the iron back in the first period, and notably, it came in a rare instance when Jon Hynes did not have Joel Eriksson-Ek’s line on the ice for the top matchup (Matthews’ post came against Marco Rossi’s unit). Despite control over the last change, Craig Berube did not actively seek many opportunities to separate the Matthews-centered top line from one of the league’s better defensive centermen; the Boldy — Eriksson-Ek — Zuccarello line saw around 15 minutes of head-to-head time against the Matthews line, leaving only two total minutes of five-on-five time spent against the Wild’s other three forward lines.


7.     In search of an extended offensive spark, we did see a loaded-up first-line shift with seven minutes remaining in the second period, as Berube bumped Nylander up to play with Matthews and Marner.

The team created a few looks to close out the period, including Pontus Holmberg in front. The Swedish center tried to make a move, but a defensive recovery from Minnesota’s Devin Shore denied him the opportunity to finish it, and the puck rolled wide of the net.

It was a game mostly devoid of rush offense, as you’d expect facing a team like Minnesota, but Matthews and Marner sped away on a rush opportunity late in the period, and it didn’t lead to much. Not long after, the puck broke the other way for a potential breakaway for Matt Boldy, but Tanev recovered to help neutralize the opportunity along with Woll.


8.     There wasn’t much going on in the third period until the Leafs finally broke through. With the Nylander line on the ice, Domi chipped the puck in along the left wing, where Holmberg retrieved it and snapped a nice pass to Nylander cutting into the slot.

Throughout the game, the Leafs weren’t particularly effective at putting a puck behind the Wild defense into an area where bodies in blue were skating onto it with speed for successful recoveries. They did this time; Holmberg did a good job of looping back and generating some speed through the neutral zone, handing it off to Domi for a chip-in, and skating onto the loose puck before turning it into immediate offense with a good pass into the slot before the Wild defense was set.

As much as his finishing hasn’t been a strength (to say the least), this is an area where Holmberg’s game has shone: generating speed through the neutral zone, putting pucks in behind the defense, and getting defensemen turning/vulnerable for drawn penalties, puck recoveries/offensive-zone time, and the odd scoring chance.


9.    Nylander’s 29th goal of the season puts him in a four-way tie for second in the NHL in goals, alongside Kyle Connor, Mark Scheifele, and Sam Reinhart. #88 continued to generate as the Leafs pushed to tie it; he set up Domi for another opportunity on the line’s next shift and later fired a cross-seam feed to a jumping-in Oliver Ekman-Larsson, who was stymied by Gustavsson (the team’s best chance to tie it).

The Marner/Matthews duo created a few looks on the shift after the 2-1 goal, including Marner ripping a shot off the mask of Gustavsson, who continued to look very solid for the Wild in net. If he was seeing them, he was stopping them, and the Leafs, as has been a problem lately, didn’t do a good enough job over the 60 minutes of getting pucks through the layers of the Wild defense with the goalie’s eyes taken away; the Wild blocked 22 shots in total.


10.    The Leafs had almost constant possession in the game’s final 10 minutes, but that didn’t always translate to Grade-A opportunities. Minnesota protected the slot reasonably well, and with Gustavsson helping them survive the post-goal onslaught, the Wild maintained the edge until the point when the Leafs needed to pull the goalie.

Once the most dangerous team in the league in this game state, 6v5 play has been a struggle all season for Toronto, and tonight was no different (on the heels of a really ugly sequence with the goalie pulled in Ottawa). They created some zone time but didn’t generate enough quality looks from the slot while struggling with multiple scares at the empty net the other way. Sloppy passes and strong defense from the Wild provided resistance, and eventually, they made one mistake too many; Marner’s neutral zone pass to Holmberg exploded off Holmberg’s stick blade. Marcus Foligno won a foot race against Nylander to snag the puck and then slid it into the empty net from his stomach.

Two top-six injuries are difficult for any NHL team to overcome offensively. Holmberg — who has two goals and eight points in 39 games after tonight’s assist — and Domi — who is playing to a five-goal 82-game pace — played over 19 minutes apiece tonight due to Tavares and Knies’ absences. Still, the inability to find the greasier offense or any form of depth scoring to at least grab a couple of points has been frustrating this past week.

Most critically, since uniting McMann with Matthews and Marner in Knies’ absence, the top line has one goal for and one against in 33 minutes of five-on-five time. Nylander is doing his best, but given the state of the other three lines at the moment and the lack of power-play goals/opportunities, those top-line results have left the team with a narrow path to scoring anywhere near enough to win, despite a couple of decent Joseph Woll/defensive showings.

The Leafs have now lost three in a row, and with Florida defeating the LA Kings on Wednesday night, they have been knocked down to second in the Atlantic Division. Let’s hope hitting the road for the fun, split-crowd atmospheres of the Western Canada road trip — and potentially getting Matthew Knies back for Saturday in Edmonton — helps them turn the page before the Four Nations break.


Game Flow: 5v5 Shot Attempts


Heat Map: 5v5 Shot Attempts


Game Highlights w/ Joe Bowen & Jim Ralph