Auston Matthews might be the best player to suit up for the Leafs in my entire lifetime, so while his start to this season has been incredible, it’s just what we’ll come to expect. If we look beyond Matthews, in my eyes, two other standouts on the team so far in their opening run are…
Teams in the NHL used to score 300 goals in a season on the regular. You probably would’ve already guessed that in the 80’s, when Gretzky was capable of putting up 200 points on his own, offense wasn’t hard to come by. All through that absurd decade and the one that preceded it, where goalies…
It’s been a long summer, but the day is finally here; The Leafs are set to get their season started this evening in Winnpeg, and it’s the beginning of perhaps the most hyped season I can remember in my adult life. We’ve covered every storyline in the Big Smoke during the offseason through the draft,…
It seems almost unthinkable that the Leafs would subtract from their already-weakest pool of right-handed defenders, but heading into the regular season opener tomorrow night in Winnipeg, are we sure they aren’t? Something that’s perhaps been taken for granted in all this talk about the new faces – Dermott, Borgman, and Rosen – who could…
It’s Roundtable Friday, and since it’ll be the last one before the regular season starts, the question to our writers is simple: As training camp and the exhibition schedule comes to a close this weekend, right now is there really anything left to be determined for this lineup? Jon Steitzer If you take a look…
Let’s just get this out of the way: Curtis McElhinney was a fine backup goaltender for the Leafs last season and came up huge in a couple crucial games. Considering he was just a waiver claim, we couldn’t have expected more from him in his 14 starts for the blue-and-white. That save on Crosby to…
Joffrey Lupul hasn’t played a game for the Maple Leafs since February of 2016, and by all accounts he’ll never suit up for another one with them. But now in the final year of his contract that carries a $5.25-million AAV, apparently he isn’t set to go quietly into the night, and wants to talk…
Year after year we tally up and present our Leafs prospect rankings. This is typically in an easy-to-digest list format counting down from 20 to 1, but we know that hockey prospects, at different ages in many different leagues, have to be looked at a few ways – there are levels to this stuff. Because…
The chances that Timothy Liljegren develops into a player as impactful as Erik Karlsson are very, very slim. After all, we are talking about maybe a top-3 defenceman in the history of hockey in Karlsson. But there’s a reason Liljegren sometimes gets compared to the fellow Swedish blue-liner, and if he can bring some of…
A few weeks ago, long-time Toronto play-caller Joe Bowen declared that he hasn’t been this excited about the Leafs heading into a season since the early nineties. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that the early nineties are when the club went through two of their best runs for the Stanley Cup since, well…the last…
It seems every summer is now the “Summer of Analytics” in the NHL, as this year we’ve seen some relatively high-profile sites go dark and their creators scooped up to fill in-house roles with various clubs. Most notably to this point, Kevin Kan of DataRink was brought aboard by Eric Tulsky and the Carolina Hurricanes,…
Well, we’re two days away from September, and while that’s entirely depressing from one standpoint, the sports world is going to get a hell of a lot better in the coming weeks. Before we put our foot on the gas leading up to Leafs training camp, however, there’s still some offseason garbage time left to…
