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The Toronto Maple Leafs were successful in earning their second straight victory without winger Mitch Marner, scoring three first-period goals in a 6-2 victory over the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday.
Tyler Bertuzzi, Pontus Holmberg, and Timothy Liljegren scored in the opening stanza, chasing Philadelphia goalie Samuel Ersson, and Auston Matthews, William Nylander, and Matthew Knies put the finishing touches of the win over the fading Flyers, who hold a precarious four-point lead over the New York Islanders in the Metropolitan Division.
Ilya Samsonov was sharp for Toronto, making 26 saves for his 18th victory of the season.
“I thought we played well. We defended well. We did the things that we wanted to do tonight in terms of not allowing the big chance. This team gets a lot off the rush — a lot of breakaways and 2-on-1s — and they get behind you a lot. I thought we managed that really well tonight, but it wasn’t perfect.” Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe said after the game. “Goaltending was a factor here. Sammy made great saves for us. We got some that I am sure their goalie coach doesn’t love on the other side. In the second period, they made the goalie switch and the guy made some big saves. They scored, and it was a game there.”
The Leafs are in a standings dead zone with a month to go in the regular season. The win kept them nine points behind the second-place Boston in the Atlantic and eight ahead of Tampa Bay in the battle for third place, with the Bruins beating Montreal 2-1 in overtime and Tampa overpowering the New York Rangers 6-3.
Toronto is essentially in a position of being a highly interested spectator in the battle for the top spot in the Atlantic. Florida’s 4-0 loss to Carolina on Thursday has the Panthers one point up on Boston, with one game in hand. The two clubs face each other two more times (in Florida on March 26th and in Boston on April 6th) which will go a long way toward determining the Leafs first-round opponent next month. Toronto also has two more games against the Panthers in their remaining 17 games, while they have no remaining matchups against Boston.
Skeptics would suggest that the difference in facing the Bruins and Panthers would be between death by hanging or death by firing squad, but the matchup of Toronto against a tenacious and physical Florida club would be a battle of contrasting styles that Toronto came up on the short end of last May.
The Bruins are talented, playoff-tested, and had the Leafs number in a four-game regular season sweep, but GM Don Sweeney did nothing to rectify their center issues at the trade deadline, which gives Toronto a matchup advantage up the middle in a seven-game series.
The difference between facing Florida and Boston is that the Panthers advantage is overall (better goaltending, better blueline, equal up front, and heavily favored on intangibles), while the Bruins advantage is primarily psychological.
This is not taking anything away from Boston. Jeremy Swayman is excellent and would have the advantage over either Samsonov or Joseph Woll, the Bruins overall defense and blueline are superior to Toronto’s, and the ability of Brad Marchand and players like Charlie Coyle to get under the skin is constant, but the advantage that Boston has in the heads of Leafs players is not just 4-1 in 2013, because no one from the current roster was on that club. This core group has lost to the Bruins twice in seven games in 2018 and 2019, and the weight of that is like starting every game behind 1-0.
That will not be easy to overcome, but in the coming weeks, Leafs fans should be quietly whispering “We Want Boston”.
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