Wednesday night’s tilt against the Columbus Blue Jackets was one to forget if you even want to call it a tilt. It looked like the Leafs were going to bring the heat en route to their fourth-straight win early on in the game, but strong play from Blue Jackets netminder Elvis Merzlikins and a couple of soft goals from Leafs goaltender Dennis Hildeby killed their momentum pretty early on, and it didn’t take long for the game to fall apart.
In an effort to ignite the building early in the game, Leafs forward Ryan Reaves finally got his long-awaited first fight of the year against fellow heavyweight, Blue Jackets forward Mathieu Olivier. It was your classic ‘old-time hockey’ fight, with both enforcers trading blows and each landing a number of significant shots before the linesmen pulled them apart. Reaves spoke recently about the fact that this was the longest he’s ever gone in a season without a fight, and when he finally got it, the home crowd seemed to drop the ball a little bit, at least according to Auston Matthews.
The lack of energy at Scotiabank Arena, specifically in the lower bowl, has been a talking point for a number of years now, and Wednesday night’s game was the latest example. There certainly isn’t any scenario where fans will, or should, be blamed for contributing to a loss, but it’s hard to argue that if the arena was booming with applause and energy after the fight, maybe the momentum would have tipped even further in Toronto’s favour. Instead, the game stayed relatively even until Columbus opened the scoring on a shorthanded goal and never looked back.
Overall, though, the game was one of those throwaways where you just pretend that it never happened and move on to the next one. The Leafs didn’t mail it in, per se, but they had enough bad bounce. Although they didn’t make too many mistakes, the ones they did make were detrimental, which Matthews also noted.
“The mistakes we made were big ones, too soft around our net,” he told reporters following the game.
The Leafs will be back in action on Saturday night when they visit the Ottawa Senators on the road and look to get back in the win column.
