The Toronto Maple Leafs’ sudden struggles continued on Saturday night with a 4-3 loss to the Boston Bruins. Coming off of a 6-2 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets on Tuesday and a 5-1 loss to the St. Louis Blues on Thursday, the temperature was hot heading into the game against Boston with the expectation to rebound in a crucial divisional game.
Unfortunately for them, the temperature was equally as hot for the Bruins, who had lost three games heading into Saturday night and carried a sub-.500 record with them. Ultimately, it was Boston who would prevail in the battle of the high temperatures.
Auston Matthews had a bit of a hero-to-zero moment in the game, scoring with under two minutes left to get the game to overtime, but he followed it up with what seemed like a pass to no man’s land, one that Boston would intercept and ultimately convert to win the game. At first glance, the giveaway seemed like a little bit of a careless decision, but it turned out to be a miscommunication between him, Mitch Marner, and Morgan Rielly.
The ill-timed giveaway came after the Leafs dominated the overtime period for the first two minutes or so, and even when Boston attempted to counter in a momentum shift, they swallowed it up pretty quickly. It’s a textbook example of how no matter how one team might work in a single game, sometimes all it takes is for the winner to capitalize on one mistake that team might make to win the game. The Leafs were far and away the better team in overtime, but that one giveaway gave Boston the extra point.
It was a tough moment for Matthews, and comes after he held himself accountable for poor play in the team’s loss to St. Louis on Thursday.
“Light on pucks, losing battles, opened up the net front tonight. It’s pretty simple,” he said. “Just a bad game all around. It starts with me. But yeah, there’s a number of things we obviously didn’t do good tonight.”
The Maple Leafs now sit below .500 with a 4-4-1 record to begin the season, and although there’s an argument to be made that this negates any reason to panic considering their tendency to start the season slowly, in a way it also works against that argument considering their limited playoff success in any of those seasons with slow starts. Picking up points early in the season helps avoid the outcome of playing a team like Boston or Tampa Bay in the first round. But alas, that’s neither here nor there right now.
The Maple Leafs are back in action on Monday against the currently undefeated Winnipeg Jets.
