Last night, the Maple Leafs faced the Columbus Blue Jackets in Toronto, lose 3-2 in overtime. This was a pretty slow game, especially in the 1st period, but 2 goals late in the 2nd for the Leafs, and 2 goals late in the 3rd for the Blue Jackets, made it a competition.

This was a very tough loss for the Leafs. Having the lead and letting it slip away always hurts. Consolation point aside, this is not an ending to feel good about.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong for the Leafs that cost them the game. The first goal for the Jackets was a lucky bounce, and it just seemed to wake them up. They awoke with a similar ferocity after the Leafs scored their first goal, but thanks to Andersen they survived that push. This one, however, just couldn’t be stopped.

There were some fantastic individual skater performances last night in this Leafs win. One you can’t help but highlight is Travis Dermott, who in just his 2nd NHL game jumps up to the 2nd pairing with Jake Gardiner, and did not look remotely out of place. I noted this in last night’s post game, but it looked like the two lefties in Gardiner and Dermott need some time to get comfortable making clean passes to exit the zone. Dermott and Gardiner both have primarily played with right-handed partners, and so an adjustment period is to be expected. Aside from that, Dermott on the puck was excellent and looks like he belongs in the NHL so far in his short stint. Here’s a couple clips of some good sequences from Dermott:

Another notable was the Leafs’ second goal scorer: William Nylander. The shot he put past Bobrovsky was one for the highlight reels, as there was millimeters of space to fit a puck in, but he managed to find a way. Here was the shot:

The last one I’ll point out was Mitch Marner, who despite not recording a point may have been the Leafs’ best forward. The discipline he showed with the puck was remarkable and he really had a positive impact on keeping the Blue Jackets at bay by maintaining puck control. Unfortunately, I don’t have a gif, but there was a play worth noting where Marner is surrounded by Blue Jackets backing into the neutral zone, so he curls back and presses forward, opening up the neutral zone more and gets both a successful zone exit and zone entry. A great showing from him tonight.

The goaltending in this game was good in the case of Andersen until the end of the game. One “negative” that should be chocked to Andersen, despite it not directly leading to a goal against, is that Andersen needs to play the puck less. We saw him screw it up against San Jose on Thursday, and it seemed a couple times last night it actually hurt the defensemen’s ability to quickly orchestrate a breakout.

Bobrovsky was no slack either, and after giving up those two goals, he sharpened up and really held the Leafs back. His save on the breakaway by Bozak in overtime was especially noteworthy.

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.

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 Blue Jackets were taking over at the start of the 2nd, but the Leafs managed to hold that off, and eventually scored two on their own surge late in the period.

Overall this ended very evenly, which is about how the game seemed.

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

We can see the Leafs had a stronger control of the front of the net than the Blue Jackets 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, the person who created Game Score for hockey, for this graphic.

As I said above, this is a tough for the Leafs to lose. The Blue Jackets are a good team and to get a point is at least something to help out with the pain. They outperformed the Blue Jackets though, and deserved a regulation win.

The next Leafs game will be against the Ottawa Senators on Wednesday night. Game start is 7:30 pm ET. See you there!