Last year when the Toronto Maple Leafs got eliminated from the playoffs, I thought it’d be a good idea to go over every goal the team scored in that season and narrow down the 16 best to form a bracket – like the Stanley Cup playoffs – and have our followers determine which Leaf player scored the goal of the season.
There were a lot of participants in last year’s polls on Twitter, and ultimately, the followers chose who scored the goal of the season for the Maple Leafs last year. The votes came in, and it was Mitch Marner’s goal against the Vegas Golden Knights from November 2, 2021.
With that said, it’s time to put together another bracket of 16 of the best goals scored by the Toronto Maple Leafs this past season. It took a while to look through all 279 goals, but eventually, I narrowed it down to 30 of the best and then trimmed it down to 16 to fit into the bracket.
How this bracket will work – if you don’t remember – is we will be posting a poll daily on our Twitter account (@TLNdc) and each day you will have the chance to vote on which goal from this past season you would like to see in the next round. Both videos of the goals will be in the tweet and below will be the poll with the player’s name and date from when the goal was scored.
Without further ado, let’s look at the bracket and all of the first-round matchups…
First-round matchups:
John Tavares (vs PHI on Nov. 2/22) vs Denis Malgin (vs ANA on Oct. 30/22)
Auston Matthews (vs NYI on Jan. 23/23) vs William Nylander (vs STL on Dec. 27/22)
Zach Aston-Reese (vs WSH on Jan. 29/23) vs John Tavares (vs FLA on Apr. 10/23)
Mitch Marner (vs EDM on Mar. 11/23) vs William Nylander (vs LA on Dec. 8/22)
Mitch Marner (vs NYR on Jan. 25/23) vs William Nylander (vs BUF on Nov. 19/22)
Ryan O’Reilly (vs BUF on Feb. 21/23) vs Mitch Marner (vs PIT on Nov. 26/22)
Mitch Marner (vs NJ on Mar. 7/23) vs William Nylander (vs FLA on Jan. 17/23)
William Nylander (vs MIN on Feb. 24/23) vs Mitch Marner (vs CHI on Feb. 19/23)
Here is what the Maple Leafs goal of the season bracket looks like so you can see where everybody is on which side of the bracket, etc.
Round one of the matchups will begin tomorrow, and each day we will be tweeting one matchup from the first round. You will have 24 hours to vote for who you would like to see in the next round before the next poll gets tweeted out.
Once the first round is complete, I will put together another article recapping that round, showing who advanced to the next round, who got eliminated, what the next matchups in the next round are, etc.
