The Toronto Maple Leafs will take on the Columbus Blue Jackets in the first game of their NHL Play-In Round series tonight. It’s a battle to secure a berth in the actual playoffs, which will start about two weeks from now. This is the NHL’s ad-hoc solution to having to suspend the season earlier this year, but it’s not the first time the Blue Jackets have threatened to keep the Leafs out of the playoffs.
The previous time was in 2014, and it was famously documented by Toronto Star sports reporter Curtis Rush with a bizarre listicle “10 reasons why it’s bad for Columbus to bump Toronto out of the NHL playoffs” that mostly took one sentence pot-shots at the State of Ohio.