Hey, at least they kept the deficit inside four goals.
The Toronto Maple Leafs’ struggles led by a lifeless power play, continued on Saturday night, dropping their third straight game to the Boston Bruins in a crucial first matchup of the season. It might sound silly to refer to a late-October game as crucial, but the Bruins had lost three straight coming into tonight’s game and have started the season worse than Toronto has, having carried a record of 3-4-1 into the game. Yes, there’s about 90% of the season remaining, but losing games to divisional opponents is never ideal, especially not when you’re both on the outside looking in and scrambling to recover dropped points early in the season.
It’s a bit of a fever dream watching such disconnected, sloppy hockey from a team that started off the season with a good effort in each of their first six games, even the losses. It’s not even a matter of not bringing a good enough effort — they just don’t seem to have an answer for any of their struggles. They continue to run back the same zone entry strategy despite the fact that a stick or a skate getting in the way is enough to thwart the entire plan and either send them back into their own zone to regroup or to result in a giveaway altogether.
The Maple Leafs’ stagnant power play once again put a donut on the board in a game where scoring even one of those could have made all the difference between 2 points and none. They made one change to the power play when it yet again started the season slow and reversed that change tonight, with Morgan Rielly taking back his spot on the point over Oliver Ekman-Larsson. To Rielly’s credit, he did score a goal and was probably the least of the team’s concerns from an offensive standpoint tonight, but it doesn’t change the fact that the team has a crippling issue with their play when they’re up a man on the ice.
The Leafs made things interesting toward the end of the game with a late goal from Auston Matthews to tie the game at 3, but a careless pass to nobody in their own zone from none other than Matthews again led to Boston’s overtime winner. It was essentially the last play you’d want from the guy who used his heroics to give his team a chance to win and should be relied on to get them those two points in the extra frame.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether the Bruins are led by Patrice Bergeron or Charlie Coyle up the middle or whether their bottom six is made up of Daniel Paille and Chris Kelly or Mark Kastelic and Justin Brazeau.
