With a new player in Muzzin arriving and creating two new pairings, the seven-day break, and a long pre-game ceremony that delayed the start of the game, we can (sort of) give the Leafs some slack for last night’s performance, but there’s no denying the effort was ugly. They had a lot of problems getting through the neutral zone clean and gaining the offensive zone successfully, and they didn’t generate much overall offensively, putting just 22 shots on goal over the 60+ minutes.
No morning skate with the back-to-back means we won’t see what changes will be coming to the forward lines tonight until close to puck drop, but Babcock said this morning that they’ll be different from what we saw last night.