Time is a flat circle. The year is 2023. We relive the first-round of 2022. The Toronto Maple Leafs, trying to end a cycle of first-round playoff exits, secure the No. 2 slot in the Atlantic Division again and battle the Tampa Bay Lightning again, doomed to repeat history in an endless loop.
So that’s one melodramatic narrative to define this long-anticipated opening-round matchup: and I say long-anticipated because it was pretty much locked in before the Times Square ball dropped to ring in the New Year. The truth, of course: no two playoff series are the same. The Leafs and Lightning have undergone significant personnel changes, especially the Leafs, who have pivoted away from analytics and finesse toward a grittier, intangible-laden lineup, seemingly in preparation to battle the Lightning, who remain the NHL’s heaviest team. We’re not seeing a true rematch of last season. No more Ondrej Palat, Ryan McDonagh, Jack Campbell and Ilya Mikheyev, to name a few of the departed 2022 participants.
So will the experienced Bolts, who reached their third consecutive Stanley Cup Final last season, again crush the Leafs’ dream of winning their first playoff series since 2004? Or will GM Kyle Dubas’ rejigged Toronto roster, which inserted six new faces into its starting lineup at the Trade Deadline alone, finally break through into the great unknown that is Round 2?
Head to Head
Toronto: 2-0-1
Tampa Bay: 1-2-0
Each team won a home game in December. In a chippy Dec. 3 affair with 15 minor penalties, the Lightning beat the Leafs 4-3 in overtime. The Leafs answered with a 4-1 win Dec. 20, halting a five-game winning streak for Tampa. Whereas the 5-on-5 expected goals were close in the first game, the Leafs were dominant in the second. The Leafs handled Tampa with a 4-3 win in Tuesday’s rubber match despite the fact Tampa dominated the play, outshooting Toronto 48-24, but the game didn’t necessarily tell us much given the Leafs rested Matthews, Marner and Mark Giordano for load management. Across the three games, the territorial play was close, with the Leafs holding the 5-on-5 expected goal edge at 52.77 percent.
Top Five Scorers
Toronto
Mitch Marner, 99 points
William Nylander, 86 points
Auston Matthews, 85 points
John Tavares, 80 points
Michael Bunting, 49 points
Tampa Bay
Nikita Kucherov, 112 points
Brayden Point, 92 points
Steven Stamkos, 84 points
Brandon Hagel, 62 points
Alex Killorn, 62 points
X-Factor
The Leafs, armed with an enviable collection of scorers, have been a consistently dominant power-play team since Spencer Carbery arrived as an assistant coach starting in 2021-22. Toronto had a league-best 27.2 percent mark last season and sits second in the NHL this season at 26.1 percent. That’s the regular season, though. Last year against the Lightning, the Leafs’ power play flatlined at 14.3 percent during their seven-game playoff defeat, going an embarrassing 4 for 24. It had no answer for penalty killers Nick Paul, Anthony Cirelli, Erik Cernak and Ryan McDonagh. Might the Leafs have an easier time with McDonagh out of the picture? They have to take advantage of a Bolts team that once again is among the league’s least disciplined, ranking second in penalties taken per 60 minutes this season.
Offense
The Leafs have consistently been an elite offensive team during the Auston Matthews/Mitch Marner era. This season, they have been something closer to “merely good,” tied for eighth in goals per game. While they continue to cash in on the power play, at 5-on-5, they sit top-10 in metrics like expected goals for, shots per 60, scoring chances per 60 and high-danger chances per 60 without ranking top-three in any of those categories. While Matthews, hampered by a hand injury for much of this season, hasn’t been the superstar who scored 60 goals last season, Mitch Marner and William Nylander have made up for it with career years, especially Marner, whose elite two-way game warrants down-ballot Hart Trophy votes. Captain John Tavares, who looked over the hill last spring, reminded us that he’s 32, not 42, and has been a point-per-game player.
The Leafs’ scoring depth is respectable. Agitator Michael Bunting has cleared 20 goals again, and 11 players on their active roster have reached 10 goals – but no Leaf blueliner has even eclipsed five goals. Offense from the defense has been subpar for Toronto in 2022-23.
As for the Bolts: they’re stride for stride with the Leafs, having scored the exact same number of goals (275) in the same number of games and sitting just behind them in power-play efficiency, fourth in the league at 25.2 percent. It almost feels like we’ve come to take the Lightning’s excellence for granted, haven’t we? Nikita Kucherov’s 112 points and Brayden Point’s 49 goals have to be two of the most overlooked individual performances in recent memory. Meanwhile, Brandon Hagel has broken out for a career year on Tampa’s top line with them, notching 29 goals and 62 points. The Bolts have five different players with at least 25 goals this season, including Steven Stamkos, who has delivered another largely healthy season. They get plenty of offense from their back end with Victor Hedman and Mikhail Sergachev driving the play.
Scariest of all: the Bolts, despite losing pieces of their championship core every year, remain a deep and well-rounded group. Even the bottom six boasts threats like Anthony Cirelli, Ross Colton and Corey Perry. Every single line can hurt you.
Defense
The Leafs underwent a distinct shift from a chance-trading circus to a team that took care of its own end fairly well beginning in 2020-21, when T.J. Brodie joined the D-corps with his quietly effective shutdown game. For much of this season, the Leafs profiled once again as an above-average defensive group. Then came a major speed wobble following the Trade Deadline, in which Dubas overhauled the blueline, shipping out Rasmus Sandin while adding Jake McCabe, Luke Schenn and Erik Gustafsson, giving the Leafs nine NHL defensemen.
The Leafs experimented with the group in March, giving Brodie and Rielly the occasional night off for load management and often starting seven defensemen, drastically reducing everyone’s ice time. Coach Sheldon Keefe couldn’t seem to find the right chemistry in March, with the Leafs tumbling to an alarming 24th in 5-on-5 expected goals against per 60. But has something clicked? In April, the Leafs are ninth in xGA/60 and have the third-best expected goal share in the league at 5-on-5. Is it the product of a relatively weak schedule that has included games against Detroit, Columbus and Montreal, or is the load management paying off? Time will tell.
The Lightning, meanwhile, remain a reasonably sturdy defensive group, with Cernak and Ian Cole doing nice shutdown work and Anthony Cirelli functioning as the top defensive forward. They sit in the top half of the NHL in most important 5-on-5 defensive metrics. That said: they graded out slightly below average in play driving since the start of March. Their penalty kill has been mediocre for the year and will need to elevate like it did last spring given their tendency to land in the sin bin.
The Bolts are a physical group, ranking seventh in the NHL in hits per 60. Even though the Leafs have added guys who can answer the bell like Schenn, McCabe and Noel Acciari, Tampa will have the edge in the brawn department, with an average player weight 10 pounds higher than the average Leaf. The question is whether the Bolts’ heavier defenders can still keep up with the Leafs’ team speed. McDonagh’s skating in a top-four shutdown role is missed.
Goaltending
Goaltending was everything in the first-round matchup last season. The Leafs had the Bolts almost dead to rights in Game 6, but future Hall of Famer Andrei Vasilevskiy kept them alive through the overtime and helped them get to Game 7. He’s the best big-game goalie on the planet, and he simply outduelled Campbell. Can ‘Vasy’ do the same opposite Ilya Samsonov? You simply can never bet against Vasilevskiy, who has almost been untouchable since the 2019-20 playoff run began. He has seven shutouts over the past three postseasons, including six in series-clinching games. The Bolts have an advantage over any opponent they face in net. Period.
Do the Leafs have a superior option to Campbell this time around, however? Samsonov has been a top-10 goalie in the NHL this season, his first in a Maple Leafs sweater after they scooped the former top prospect off the scrap heap when the Washington Capitals chose not to qualify him last summer. Among 55 goalies with at least 1,000 minutes played this season, Samsonov sits ninth in goals saved above average per 60. He has posted a save percentage of .913 or higher in every month except March. He’s been a consistent safety net for Toronto and has done so with the breezy confidence any team wants in a playoff goaltender. That said: Samsonov has only seven career starts and a 1-6-0 record in the playoffs. He’s largely unproven and has been nursing some sort of nagging injury over the past few weeks. Whatever the malady is, it’s bad enough that the Leafs have decided to rest him until the playoffs.
If Samsonov falters: it’s looking less likely by the day that Toronto can count on two-time Cup winner Matt Murray, currently on the shelf with his third injury of the season. He’s been inconsistent when healthy, too. Prospect Joseph Woll has shown quite well in limited NHL duty and might be the superior backup option even to a healthy Murray at the moment.
Injuries
Was Tanner Jeannot worth the five draft picks Tampa traded for him? We may not have the answer for a while, as the heavy-hitting bottom six forward is out with a lower-body injury that is expected to cost him at least the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Leafs’ injury report has been difficult to decipher, as they have masqueraded what might simply be load management with minor injury designations (Calle Jarnkrok, Sam Lafferty, etc.). Defenseman Jake Muzzin (neck) and left winger Nick Robertson (shoulder) were lost to season-ending injuries months ago. Murray’s head injury has an unpredictable recovery timeline; it doesn’t bode well that he has not joined Toronto on its season-ending road trip, however.
Intangibles
The Leafs have built teams with their head, not their heart, in the Dubas era, with consistently great regular season results. This time around, they sent a message that they were prioritizing intangible success when they added three Stanley Cup rings: one from 2018-19 Conn Smythe Trophy winner Ryan O’Reilly and two from Schenn, who played on Tampa’s back-to-back championship teams in 2020 and 2021. The skill has never been in question, but do these Leafs finally have the grit to get that extra goal in that clutch situation? Amazingly, the Leafs have had three overtimes in the past two postseasons in which they were a goal away from advancing to Round 2. They lost all three times.
On Tampa’s end: how many more years can we see them grind through the postseason, how many more shortened offseason training regimens, until they finally break down? I asked the same question last year. Now they have four more rounds of playoff mileage. No NHL player on Earth has logged more minutes over the regular season and playoffs than Hedman since 2019-20. It feels like the party has to end at some point. On the other hand: the Bolts’ ability to persevere with the gas tank empty is what makes them great. They made it to the Final last year despite losing Point for multiple rounds after his injury in Round 1 against Toronto.
Series prediction
Flip a coin, again. For the second straight season, the Leafs look like the slightly superior team on paper and had the stronger regular season to show for it. But the choke narrative will remain lodged in the Leafs’ collective brain until they kick it, and they once again match up against decade’s most clutch team. The Lightning’s scoring depth at forward could give the Leafs fits again. Bet on a series as tightly contested as last season’s. At this point, after their six straight opening-round defeats, I have to pick the Leafs’ opponent until they prove me wrong.
Lightning in seven games.
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RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Canada’s Gabriela Dabrowski and New Zealand’s Erin Routliffe remain undefeated in women’s doubles at the WTA Finals.
The 2023 U.S. Open champions, seeded second at the event, secured a 1-6, 7-6 (1), (11-9) super-tiebreak win over fourth-seeded Italians Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in round-robin play on Tuesday.
The season-ending tournament features the WTA Tour’s top eight women’s doubles teams.
Dabrowski and Routliffe lost the first set in 22 minutes but levelled the match by breaking Errani’s serve three times in the second, including at 6-5. They clinched victory with Routliffe saving a match point on her serve and Dabrowski ending Errani’s final serve-and-volley attempt.
Dabrowski and Routliffe will next face fifth-seeded Americans Caroline Dolehide and Desirae Krawczyk on Thursday, where a win would secure a spot in the semifinals.
The final is scheduled for Saturday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Nov. 5, 2024.
EDMONTON – Jake Allen made 31 saves for his second shutout of the season and 26th of his career as the New Jersey Devils closed out their Western Canadian road trip with a 3-0 victory over the Edmonton Oilers on Monday.
Jesper Bratt had a goal and an assist and Stefan Noesen and Timo Meier also scored for the Devils (8-5-2) who have won three of their last four on the heels on a four-game losing skid.
The Oilers (6-6-1) had their modest two-game winning streak snapped.
Calvin Pickard made 13 stops between the pipes for Edmonton.
TAKEAWAYS
Devils: In addition to his goal, Bratt picked up his 12th assist of the young season to give him nine points in his last eight games and now 15 points overall. Nico Hischier remains in the team lead, picking up an assist of his own to give him 16 points for the campaign. He has a point in all but four games this season.
Oilers: Forward Leon Draisaitl was held pointless after recording six points in his previous two games and nine points in his previous four. Draisaitl usually has strong showings against the Devils, coming into the contest with an eight-game point streak against New Jersey and 11 goals in 17 games.
KEY MOMENT
New Jersey took a 2-0 lead on the power play with 3:26 remaining in the second period as Hischier made a nice feed into the slot to Bratt, who wired his third of the season past Pickard.
KEY RETURN?
Oilers star forward and captain Connor McDavid took part in the optional morning skate for the Oilers, leading to hopes that he may be back sooner rather than later. McDavid has been expected to be out for two to three weeks with an ankle injury suffered during the first shift of last Monday’s loss in Columbus.
OILERS DEAL FOR D-MAN
The Oilers have acquired defenceman Ronnie Attard from the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for defenceman Ben Gleason.
The 6-foot-3 Attard has spent the past three season in the Flyers organization seeing action in 29 career games. The 25-year-old right-shot defender and Western Michigan University grad was originally selected by Philadelphia in the third round of the 2019 NHL Entry Draft. Attard will report to the Oilers’ AHL affiliate in Bakersfield.
UP NEXT
Devils: Host the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday.
Oilers: Host the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 4, 2024.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Patrick Mahomes threw for 291 yards and three touchdowns, and Kareem Hunt pounded into the end zone from two yards out in overtime to give the unbeaten Kansas City Chiefs a 30-24 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday night.
DeAndre Hopkins had two touchdown receptions for the Chiefs (8-0), who drove through the rain for two fourth-quarter scores to take a 24-17 lead with 4:17 left. But then Kansas City watched as Baker Mayfield led the Bucs the other way in the final minute, hitting Ryan Miller in the end zone with 27 seconds to go in regulation time.
Tampa Bay (4-5) elected to kick the extra point and force overtime, rather than go for a two-point conversion and the win. And it cost the Buccaneers when Mayfield called tails and the coin flip was heads. Mahomes and the Chiefs took the ball, he was 5-for-5 passing on their drive in overtime, and Hunt finished his 106-yard rushing day with the deciding TD plunge.
Travis Kelce had 14 catches for 100 yards with girlfriend Taylor Swift watching from a suite, and Hopkins finished with eight catches for 86 yards as the Chiefs ran their winning streak to 14 dating to last season. They became the sixth Super Bowl champion to start 8-0 the following season.
Mayfield finished with 200 yards and two TDs passing for the Bucs, who have lost four of their last five.
It was a memorable first half for two players who had been waiting to play in Arrowhead Stadium.
The Bucs’ Rachaad White grew up about 10 minutes away in a tough part of Kansas City, but his family could never afford a ticket for him to see a game. He wound up on a circuitous path through Division II Nebraska-Kearney and a California junior college to Arizona State, where he eventually became of a third-round pick of Tampa Bay in the 2022 draft.
Two year later, White finally got into Arrowhead — and the end zone. He punctuated his seven-yard scoring run in the second quarter, which gave the Bucs a 7-3 lead, by nearly tossing the football into the second deck.
Then it was Hopkins’ turn in his first home game since arriving in Kansas City from a trade with the Titans.
The three-time All-Pro, who already had caught four passes, reeled in a third-down heave from Mahomes amid triple coverage for a 35-yard gain inside the Tampa Bay five-yard line. Three plays later, Mahomes found him in the back of the end zone, and Hopkins celebrated his first TD with the Chiefs with a dance from “Remember the Titans.”
Tampa Bay tried to seize control with consecutive scoring drives to start the second half. The first ended with a TD pass to Cade Otton, the latest tight end to shred the Chiefs, and Chase McLaughlin’s 47-yard field goal gave the Bucs a 17-10 lead.
The Chiefs answered in the fourth quarter. Mahomes marched them through the rain 70 yards for a tying touchdown pass, which he delivered to Samaje Perine while landing awkwardly and tweaking his left ankle, and then threw a laser to Hopkins on third-and-goal from the Buccaneers’ five-yard line to give Kansas City the lead.
Tampa Bay promptly went three-and-out, but its defence got the ball right back, and this time Mayfield calmly led his team down field. His capped the drive with a touchdown throw to Miller — his first career TD catch — with 27 seconds to go, and Tampa Bay elected to play for overtime.
UP NEXT
Buccaneers: Host the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday.