The Toronto Maple Leafs found themselves swept by the St. Louis Blues in their 2024-25 season series, delaying head coach Craig Berube’s first win against his former team until next season at least. While this one may not have been as ugly on the scoresheet as the last one, it was definitely a little more frustrating, considering the circumstances. The fact that they followed what most would consider being a perfect road period in the first with three goals against in the second will come up in the postgame blogs you read, but the prime takeaway is that the power play once again failed them and likely cost them a point, maybe two. And that’s how we’re going to kick things off.
Maple Leafs’ power play sets a franchise record
…it wasn’t a good one.
With another donut on the board, after four power play opportunities amounted to nothing, they extended their current drought on the road to the point that a new franchise record was set.
Maple Leafs: 0-for-18 PP on the road
They set a franchise record for the most opportunities without a road PP goal to begin a season
— Sportsnet Stats (@SNstats) November 3, 2024
The power play drops to the worst in the league at a dreadful 7.9% on the season, with only three power play goals on 38 opportunities. This comes after Berube shuffled the units a few games ago, dropping William Nylander and John Tavares to the second unit in favour of Max Pacioretty and Matthew Knies, and while the head coach has remained optimistic that the team will figure it out with the man advantage, he didn’t have much good to say about it following the game.
“For me, it’s execution, to be honest with you,” Berube told reporters. “But the other thing is there’s not a directness to it. We’re not getting pucks to the net enough. We’re on the power play. We need to shoot pucks more. We need to get pucks to the net and create opportunities around the net on broken plays. But we’re not. There’s not a shot mentality on the power play right now.”
The last part of that quote reflects what was easily the most damning play of the game. While it technically didn’t come on the power play, a game of hot potato between Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner with the goalie pulled led to the turnover that iced the game for St. Louis. They couldn’t get set up, throwing the puck back and forth at each other until the Blues eventually broke the play up before they could get a cycle going and took it the other way.
The fact of the matter is that the Maple Leafs are going to continue to lose games like this until the power play is fixed, at least to the point of competence. It doesn’t matter how good you’re capable of playing at 5-on-5, if you’re not converting on those points of advantage, you’re not going to win many hockey games. Tonight was a perfect example of that. Even though the penalty kill did its job, with the Blues going 0-for-4 themselves, they likely dropped more points than they would have if they converted on even one of those chances.
With all of that being said, here are some additional takeaways to close things out.
- Joseph Woll wasn’t great tonight, but the game shouldn’t be an indictment on his play. The Blues cast a perfect screen in front of him on the first goal, the second goal was a flukey deflection off of Jake McCabe’s skate and in, and the third was one that he probably wants back. While he wasn’t as sharp as he was in Thursday’s win over the Seattle Kraken, he went from looking like one of the reasons they would lose to one of the only reasons they were in it until the final minute.
- The downside to the recent surge in offence from the second line after pairing Max Pacioretty with Tavares and Nylander is that the third line seems to be a bit of a black hole offensively. Max Domi and Bobby McMann are both pointless in their last six games, and whether it’s Pontus Holmberg or Nick Robertson on their right side, they’re not getting much done offensively. It may be time to reunite Nylander with McMann and Domi to get that line going while keeping the Pacioretty/Tavares connection intact.
- Not that it necessarily amounted to anything, but it was encouraging to see Matthews take exception to Ryan Suter’s hit on Marner in the third period. While it was questionable that he was the only one to come away with a penalty from the ensuing scrum, the Maple Leafs were able to get some of that momentum back after McCabe drew a penalty in a scrappy shift 30 seconds later. A goal at 4-on-4 or on the brief power play that followed would have completed the momentum boost, but we don’t need to dwell on that point as much as we have already. At least not tonight.
The Maple Leafs will have another chance to try and leave the weekend on a high note when they take on the Minnesota Wild tonight.
