TORONTO — Uh oh.
This one will leave a mark.
It’s not just that the Toronto Maple Leafs outplayed the team they’re battling for a playoff spot and somehow surrendered two valuable points in regulation. They also lost starting goaltender Frederik Andersen to an upper-body injury on Monday and saw the Florida Panthers put three third-period goals behind backup Michael Hutchinson in a spirit-crushing 5-3 loss.
How do you measure the Leafs’ dominance?
They didn’t allow a single shot against Andersen in the opening 11 minutes of the game. After Hutchinson came in for the second period, he faced just three shots in 20 minutes — two from the neutral zone and a harmless 46-foot dribbler off the stick of Colton Sceviour.
None of those had any chance of going in.
The job got a little tougher after Auston Matthews made it 3-1 in the opening minute of the third period and Hutchinson wasn’t up to the task. Mark Pysyk scored his second of the night from in close, Jonathan Huberdeau tied it on a power play and Mike Hoffman inserted the dagger from below the goal line on a spinning attempt.
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Pysyk, a defenceman deployed on the wing for this game, finished the hat trick into an empty net.
That squandered an otherwise dominant effort from the home side. The Leafs had a particularly stout middle frame, with John Tavares tipping home a Mitch Marner pass on the power play before William Nylander picked up his 25th of the season by chipping a nice Kasperi Kapanen feed past Sergei Bobrovsky to make it 2-1.
As they look to move past a game they probably should have won, all eyes now shift to Andersen.
He was involved in two collisions during the first period and didn’t emerge from the dressing room after the intermission. Frank Vatrano and teammate Jake Muzzin went crashing into Andersen before Pysyk backed into the Leafs starter’s head with 3:45 to play in the period.
If his absence is prolonged, that’s an even bigger blow to the Leafs playoff chances than this loss to the Panthers.
