Just the information
When: 7:00 PM tonight
Where: Toronto, ON’s Scotiabank Arena
How to watch: NHL Network, 98.5, NESN The Sports Center
Contrarian viewpoint: Pension Plan Puppets
Recognize your enemy
12-6-3, third place in the Atlantic Division, 27PTS
Mitch Marner: 8G-15A-23PTS; William Nylander: 12G-16A-28PTS; Auston Matthews: 14G-9A-23PTS
8-5-0, 2.74 GAA, and.917 save percentage is Joseph Woll.
Notes on the game
Leafs! Bruins! In the city! a Saturday evening! In the NHL, it doesn’t get much brighter than these lights.
The Leafs have won their last two games, a 4-3 victory over Seattle on Thursday and a rather contentious 2-1 victory over Florida on Tuesday, both in shootouts. The Leafs have won seven of their last ten games overall.
The Leafs are Shootout Heroes this season, as one of you wonderful people noted in another thread: in nearly 20% of their games this season, a shootout has resulted in a victory in four of the five instances.
Funny enough, that one defeat occurred in the first meeting between these two teams this season—the Bruins won 3-2 at TD Garden precisely one month ago today.
Brad Marchand and Timothy Liljegren had a semi-controversial (if you’re a Leafs fan) confrontation during that November game that resulted in Liljegren’s injury. Even though Ryan Reaves skated with Marchand several times during that game, he believed that things would have been different had they skated together again. Tonight, he might try his best impression of “Georges Laraque chasing around Milan Lucic at the Bell Centre.” It will be intriguing to observe the outcome of that one.
David Pastrnak’s close friend and frequently criticized William Nylander is leading the Leafs in scoring this year. Nylander has frequently been used as a scapegoat by Leafs supporters throughout his career, but right now, he is scoring points per game at a rate that would smash his previous career best, making him a free agent at the conclusion of the season. He can play center, isn’t that right? Don, just saying.
The Leafs have won their previous five games at Scotiabank Place and are 7-4-0 overall while playing at home.
For the time being, it seems that Joseph Woll has been handed the starting role. The last three games for the Leafs, he has started.
After a rough start, former (brief) Bruin Tyler Bertuzzi has rebounded somewhat, scoring six points in his previous nine games.
Remarkably, for a club with so much offensive talent, the Leafs are just 12th in the league in GF/G, barely behind the 10th-place Bruins. The Leafs are still a bottom-tier defensive team (19th in GA/G), though that seems to have been the case for ten years.
Even though Jeremy Swayman won a shutout on Thursday, Jim Montgomery probably won’t change his goalies tonight and will start Linus Ullmark.
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