Last night, the Maple Leafs took on the San Jose Sharks in Toronto, pulling out a win in a shootout. This was a very close and entertaining game against a good west coast team. Check out last night’s post game for goal gifs and the like!

 

The goaltending in this game was excellent. A gigantic gaffe from Andersen directly causing the second goal, but otherwise he played excellent.

By “Goals Saved Above Average”, the most reliable goaltending statistic out there currently, both goaltenders failed to meet average. Andersen was a +0.9, and Jones was +1.21. This is to say that Andersen stopped ~1 more goal than an exactly “average” goalie, which is a pretty good performance.

Other than the gaffe, Andersen looked strong and as calm as usual. His best save came off of that Thornton-Pavelski 2-on-1 on Polak. As for Jones, the performance was excellent. He stopped a multitude of scoring chances for the Leafs and was very difficult to beat.

From corsica.hockey‘s game report from this game.

This is a chart showing how the shot attempts racked up as the game went on. The strong black dots show when goals were scored. Some interesting things to note, like how the Sharks were taking over at the start of the 2nd, possibly carrying momentum from the late period goal. But, the Leafs turned it around midway through the 2nd period.

All together, they came out pretty equal in this game, shot attempts wise. That definitely passes the smell test with how close this game seemed throughout.

I thought the Leafs’ 3rd pairing were pretty rough in this game. Their defensive zone coverage was not good, and they struggled to exit.

The whole Leafs top 9 forward group seemed to be playing well in this one. It was a lot of energy up front that helped drive the game. The 4th line less so, but with such a deep Sharks team, the mediocre Leafs 4th line didn’t stand much of a chance.

From naturalstattrick.com‘s heat maps in last night’s game report.

We can see the Sharks had a stronger control of the front of the net than the Leafs did, but not by much. Typically the Leafs are a very strong net front team, creating plenty of chances there from players like Hyman, Brown, Van Riemsdyk and Marner who really drive those areas.

Game Score looks at all the important elements of a player’s statistical performance in a particular game and outputs a number relative to how well they did. Read more about it here.

The Leafs by Game Score from last night is shown below. Thanks to Dom himself for this graphic.

As I said above, this was a very fun game to watch. The Sharks are a good team and to get the two points was a good effort. They outperformed the Sharks, and deserved a regulation win.

The next Leafs game will be Saturday night (tomorrow at the time of this post) against the Vancouver Canucks in Toronto. Game start is 7 pm ET. See you there!