Bright lights, etc.
Just the facts
When: Tonight, 7 PM
Where: Scotiabank Arena – Toronto, ON
How to follow: NESN, NHL Network, 98.5 The Sports Hub
Opposing perspective: Pension Plan Puppets
Know your enemy
- 12-6-3, 27PTS, 3rd in the Atlantic Division
- William Nylander: 12G-16A-28PTS; Auston Matthews: 14G-9A-23PTS; Mitch Marner: 8G-15A-23PTS
- Joseph Woll: 8-5-0, 2.74 GAA, .917 save percentage
Game notes
- Bruins! Leafs! In Toronto! On a Saturday night! The bright lights don’t get much brighter than this in the NHL.
- The Leafs have won two games in a row, both in a shootout: a 4-3 win over Seattle on Thursday and a somewhat controversial 2-1 win over Florida on Tuesday. Overall, the Leafs are 7-2-1 in their last ten.
- As one of you fine folks pointed out in another thread, the Leafs are Shootout Heroes this season: close to 20% of their games have gone to a shootout this season, with the Leafs winning four of five.
- That one loss, funnily enough, came in the first meeting of the season between these two teams, a 3-2 Bruins win at TD Garden exactly one month ago today.
- That November game featured the semi-controversial (if you’re a Leafs fan) incident between Brad Marchand and Timothy Liljegren, which left Liljegren injured. Ryan Reaves, who insisted things would have been different had he been on the ice with Marchand again even though he was on the ice with Marchand again multiple times in that game, may do his best “Georges Laraque chasing around Milan Lucic at the Bell Centre” tonight. It’ll be interesting to see how that one shakes out.
- Oft-maligned William Nylander, good buddy of David Pastrnak, is leading the Leafs in scoring this season. Nylander has been a scapegoat for Leafs fans often in his career, but his current points-per-game pace would shatter his previous career high…just in time for him to be a free agent at season’s end. Hey, he can play center, right? Just saying, Don.
- The Leafs are 7-4-0 overall at home and have won their last five games at Scotiabank Place.
- Joseph Woll appears to have been given the starter’s job for now. He has started the Leafs’ last three games.
- Former (brief) Bruin Tyler Bertuzzi has shown some signs of shaking off his slow start, recording six points in his last nine games.
- Surprisingly for a team with so much firepower up front, the Leafs are just 12th in the league in GF/G, slightly behind the Bruins (10th). As seems to have been the case for a decade, though, the Leafs are still a bottom(ish)-tier defensive team (19th in GA/G).
- While Jeremy Swayman earned a shutout win on Thursday, I’d assume Jim Montgomery will continue to rotate his goalies and give Linus Ullmark the start tonight.
See ya tonight!