October 16, 2022 – Early days, but a few interesting trends are appearing for both teams. Toronto is 2-1 with its loss coming vs Montreal. The Habs are 1-2. Toronto has 9 goals for and 8 against. That’s not good for the Leafs. Montreal has 5 goals for and 9 against which clearly shows early issues.
The Leafs have no real surprises statwise among it’s players. The scorers are offensive. The non scorers aren’t scoring. The D corp are eating up lots of minutes without producing much offense. Matt Murray had their one loss, and Ilya Samsonov is playing well.
For Montreal the issue is the D is struggling. With Matheson, and Edmundson out Montreal is essentially playing without their top 2 D men. Jake Allen has been stellar, and Monty has been….Monty.
Up front Sean Monahan has been really impressive. While it hasn’t amounted to much point wise, his face off and shots per game have been great.
Christian Dvorak has not got off to a great start, although his Face off numbers are good.
Dadonov has not been strong, and only 1 shot per game won’t cut it from the Russian.
Slafkovsky needs to go to Laval stat. As this writer predicted #1 is struggling in the NHL. There’s just not enough value having him play 3L when he could be playing his butt off in Laval.
Hoffman only has 1 shot in 3 games. And he can actually skate the puck.
Drouin’s first game featured lots of ice time including 2 minutes on the PP and resulted in no shots. No offensive stats.
Clearly the offense needs to spark. It can’t all be blamed on the struggling young D corp.
jamie@cornwallfreenews.com