NHL Burns the Maple Leafs With Extremely Challenging Schedule Once Again

With the 2025-26 regular season schedule having been unveiled, the NHL did the Maple Leafs no favours once again, with a near-league-high number of back to backs.

Something to keep the NHL fans going during the dog days of summer, the entire league released their regular season schedule for all to see, and once the dust settled, it was interesting to see how things shaped out.
The Toronto Maple Leafs will be opening the 2025-26 campaign with a home game against the Montreal Canadiens on the 8th of October. Also the highly anticipated return of Mitch Marner at the Scotiabank Arena is set to take place on January 23rd.
However, more importantly, the Maple Leafs were handed a rather unfavourable disadvantage once again with the number of back-to-backs they will have to endure. In 2024-25, Toronto had a league high 16 sets of back-to-backs and things remained the same in 2025-26 with 15 sets upcoming.

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Their 15 back-to-backs are second only to Montreal, Los Angeles, San Jose, and the New York Islanders who will be playing in 16, and while the schedule is going to be a lot more condensed this season due to the Olympic Break in February, some teams escaped the clutches of the NHL schedule-makers.
Calgary and Winnipeg were scheduled with a league-low 9 sets of back-to-backs, Anaheim and Utah followed them with 11, and then a quartet of teams including Vegas and Colorado have 12.
Calgary, for instance, actually kicks off the season with consecutive games and have 5 sets of their 9 back-to-backs in the first 2 months of the season, and then finishes things off with just 2 sets in the final 3 months.
Conversely, the Maple Leafs have 7 alone in the months of February, March, and April, including one right after the Olympic break and then 4 sets in March.
It's going to be interesting to see how the Leafs fare in these familiar situations this coming season after having gone 10-4-2 on the second game of back-to-backs in 2024-25. Having a strong tandem in goal is a great start and should be a recipe for success in 2025-26 once again.