It’s a Saturday night and the game is at 7pm here at home, meaning there’s going to be lots of eyes on the Maple Leafs to see if they can actually play that hockey or not. The west coast road trip has been annoying to say the least, with extremely late starts coupled with semi-hopeful, but mostly mediocre play from the Leafs.
They neither out-played or beat notably bad teams like San Jose and Anaheim, or give any kind of notable performance against the hot mess Golden Knights of all teams. I don’t expect the Leafs to win every game against bad teams — I expect them to win most, for sure — but what I do expect is for the Leafs to massively pummel their opponents when the puck is on the ice.