Last night the Leafs beat the Ottawa Senators by scoring first and always holding a lead. They never looked worried or like they had to risk it all just to get a goal. They were untroubled by close checking and did a lot of their own. Anthony Stolarz wasn’t actually peak Stolie the Goalie and they won anyway. Aside from busting the tiresome myth that the Leafs are just goaltending, what else was there to learn?
The Retcons are Telling
The after party is meaningful this time. The Senators, by way of Travis Green, complained about the Leafs selling calls. This is the cognitive dissonance of hockey, and don’t rag on Green, fans are worse. The refs are supposed to call the rulebook religiously, never make even-up calls, and also achieve at least parity in the number of power plays for the team they cheer for. Cake, eat it, etc.
Green is giving his team an outside force to focus on, a classic of team building you might notice in use in elections recently. But what of the Leafs? Craig Berube has nothing to deflect from, but the fans who know what the word Corsi means sure do. Anyone noticing that the Senators owned the puck most of the time at five-on-five has to do some vigorous handwaving.
It’s not like this is new, and while it isn’t surprising that the Leafs – in the bottom half of the NHL in Corsi and Expected Goals – struggled at the things they struggle at. Zone exits spring instantly to mind. You can’t change a team’s basic skill mix, and this is likely a thing that will dog them for most of the playoffs. Scoff if you like, but it’s a real issue. But 6-2, though, is just pointing at the same things that have been mitigating the team’s weaknesses all season. And those are risky things. Risky in the sense that they are not all that reliable. It’s like relying on your flaky sportscar to get to work every day vs the bus that keeps to a schedule. The car can take you places and hit speeds the bus can’t, but the bus is going to be there for sure.
Line vs Line
Auston Matthews vs Tim Stützle went to Matthews in several meaningful ways, but not possession figures. Matthews got owned, and while we’re at it, so did John Tavares vs Shane Pinto. But the Matthews line kept Brady Tkachuk to a low quality of shooting, and Stützle to a low enough number that he wasn’t a threat. They played with Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe most of the night which is a factor. Bear in mind, the Senators were always behind, and working as hard as they could to score, at all times.
But don’t kid yourself, that was a hard slog of a matchup for everyone on the top six. Craig Berube took Max Domi off line two and replaced him with Pontus Holmberg midway through the game.
Berube didn’t trust his third line to do much, with or without Domi. They played about the same as the extremely effective fourth line, and served to give top six wingers some minutes against lesser competition. Even so, the bottom half of the lineup and the third pair were fine, and they handled the Senators’ depth with ease.
Power Play
Auston Matthews had half his shots (Corsi, not Shots on Goal) on the power play, and he, John Tavares and Matthew Knies were dominant shooters. The first unit more than deserved the goals they scored/created. The Leafs second unit and Ottawa, with a lot fewer minutes, were very ineffective at generating any sort of good shooting.
Penalty Kill
It’s hard to judge a PK without mistaking the outcome for the inputs. The Senators did not block many shots, and in one instance, their PK looked very effective, while at other times it was up to Linus Ullmark.
Skill
The Senators got a lot of shots (still not Shots on Goal) from defencemen. And that’s a large part of the reason why their Corsi advantage wasn’t helpful to them. Brady Tkachuk played like some other player altogether to his usual self, and I’m willing to credit the defending he had to contend with for it for part of that.
He was the Senators’ most prolific shooter. Which is revealing both of his play and Stützle’s, as he didn’t really do much and was well down the list in terms of total shots.
In year’s past, when the Leafs were kept well away from the net by the Boston Bruins or the Florida Panthers, that was assumed to be all the defending team’s prowess mixed with the core four’s inability to play the tough minutes. That’s a story fit around the facts to sell a point of view.
For this game, I’m not going to claim to know how the mix worked out. If Tkachuk was just not very good or if the Leafs were just excellent at limiting quality but not quantity of shooting. There’s a mix, and how it happened is made up of so many individual actions, we can’t really understand it in anyway but the result. And the result was excellent.
Goaltending
Anthony Stolarz got a few saves over expected, and Linus Ullmark was not at all good. If the knock on the Leafs is going to be that Ullmark was terrible, well Stolie spotted the Sens a goal and they finished with two.
Conclusion
This was a classic 2025 Leafs game: the three pillars of success were all there: Goaltending, Skill and Special Teams. They got outshot, heavily and more that can be explained by score effects, in the last half of the game. Score effects are an average over thousands of games by all sorts of teams. The Leafs have a habit of giving up way more shots with a big lead than that average. The Sens also increased their shot quality in the third period, which is the exact opposite of how score effects work.
This was not the best game ever played by either team, and the Leafs can absolutely be better. The second line is the obvious place to want to see some even-strength improvement. Matthews’ main job is going to continue to be stymying the Stützle line.
I don’t actually expect the Senators to play so stupid tomorrow. But they can’t conjure up skill they don’t have. The Leafs can actually play even better than they did.
