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On the heels of an ugly 6-3 defeat in Dallas, the Maple Leafs suffered a second consecutive blowout loss on Thursday night in St. Louis.

Your game in ten:

1. This marks the first time the Leafs have lost three games in a row in regulation this season. There is reason to be concerned that the Leafs just had the doors blown off by two teams playing desperate hockey to start the final stretch coming off of the All-Star break. This test was always coming, though, and it’s one the Leafs will have to adapt to and survive to call themselves a playoff team.

2. Frederik Andersen has now allowed eight goals on his last 39 shots, and yet he was probably the only reason this was still a tie game after the first period. The Leafs had one solid shift in the first half of the first period – courtesy of their fourth line — but other than that were receiving the game and gave up three or four high-quality scoring chances, including a partial breakaway for Colton Parayko and a clear breakaway for David Perron. He got beat along the ice through the five hole on the 1-1 goal (he got his stick caught underneath his pad, opening up the hole) and has to take a sizable share of the blame there, but it could have easily been three for the Blues after the first if not for Andersen.

Andersen gave up five by the end of this game yet didn’t play especially poorly. Matthews and Marincin were asleep on the 2-1 goal and left Paul Stastny alone in front on a pass out from behind the net; the 3-1 was a great individual effort by an elite player in Tarasenko, and a Brown and Komarov mix-up on the penalty kill allowed Parayko far too much time and space to step in and measure a shot on the 4-1 goal. The 5-1 goal deflected right in front and Andersen still made the initial save, but he got no help from his D on Statsny in front on the rebound. Maybe Andersen could’ve been more square on that Parayko goal, but at best he is taking part responsibility on two of the goals.

With the breakdowns we’ve seen from the Leafs the past few games, all it’s taken is an average Andersen to produce a blowout.

3. Hard to wrap your head around what Ben Smith was doing on this play. This is what a few months worth of rust looks like…

4. Thought the Leafs only had two players going in this game going from the start — Nikita Soshnikov, who has put together his most impressive five-game stretch of the season, and William Nylander, who showed good urgency on the forecheck.

There wasn’t a whole lot else to like about the Leafs last night from top to bottom. The JVR, Marner and Bozak line scored the Leafs’ goal and spent a good chunk of time in the offensive zone, but they were also sent out for offensive zone faceoffs on 90% of their 5v5 shifts. The fourth line outside of Soshnikov went quiet after a promising start, and the Matthews line had maybe its worst game of the season.

5. Matthews’ recent seven-game stretch has been his slowest of the season in terms of points and shots – one goal, 0 assists, 21 shots on goal. He had just one point in seven games in October after his white-hot start, but he shot the puck 28 times over that span.

This is a different game if Matthews buries the set-up by Nylander on a wide-open net on that late first-period powerplay (it would’ve been 2-1 Leafs at the intermission). The puck seemed to hop on him a bit and he missed high with Jake Allen down and out. Them’s the breaks.

Recent history tells us that when he breaks through again it’ll come in bunches.

6. They’re extreme cases, but these past two games have got me thinking about how the Leafs do not chase games well. While the Leafs opened the scoring last night, the team’s record when scored on first is 4-12-4. The positive takeaway from that is that the team doesn’t trail first often (20/49 games). The bad news is that their .200 win percentage when trailing first is very poor — 28th in the NHL, ahead of only Dallas and Colorado.

A better indicator of the Leafs’ struggles when trailing is their paltry Goals For Percentage of 42.9% in those situations, which is ahead of only Tampa Bay and Colorado league wide. That points pretty clearly to the Leafs’ inability to play with structure and work themselves back into games when it doesn’t go right early. How much of that is the lack of experience on the roster — feeding into an inability to methodically work themselves back into games as good veteran teams do — and how much of it is down to some of the systems play we’ve seen from the team this season? Both could be factors. Good teams lock up the neutral zone with the lead and the Leafs’ reliance on the long bomb or chip out in their breakouts can start to get them into trouble in those situations.

7. It’s a little surprising that Matthews and Marner weren’t put back together when the Leafs were down a couple after the spark they provided in the Dallas game, but it was likely a case of Babcock not wanting to reward poor efforts with the present of playing with your buddy.

8. Mike Babcock eased Morgan Rielly back into the lineup with 18:31 in time on ice (fourth among the Leafs D) including just 23 seconds on the powerplay and 28 seconds on the penalty kill. This was a bit of a rough return to the lineup for #44, coughing up the early breakaway and getting a ‘welcome back’ from Tarasenko on his goal, which was more of a great individual effort by a 40-goal scorer than anything else. The Leafs’ blue line will need Rielly and Zaitsev to rediscover the rhythm they were settling into prior to Rielly’s injury in short order here.

9. Speaking of the Leafs’ blue line — after the game Polak and Marincin had, it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Hunwick (a scratch last night) and Polak back together Saturday in Boston. Marincin continues to be an enigma wrapped in a puzzle — how he can jump into the lineup coming off of an injury and play top-pairing minutes well for two or three games and then look like a deer in headlights in a bottom-pair role is beyond me.

10. As bad as these last two games have been for the Leafs, if they can regroup on Saturday and beat the Bruins in their building, they will be sitting in a great position at the 50-game mark – one point behind Boston for the third divisional playoff spot with five games in hand. Even if the Leafs lose on Saturday, everything is right there in front of them with how the chips are falling in the Atlantic Division. It’s a position the Leafs would’ve gladly accepted no questions asked if it was offered to them back in October.


Game in Six


Post-Game: Mike Babcock