Maple Leafs record pyrrhic victory in shootout win over last-ranked Canucks

It’s not exactly ‘damned if you, damned if you don’t’ territory for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but few could be pleased with the result of Saturday’s game. Toronto emerged with a 3-2 victory over the last-ranked Vancouver Canucks in a shootout, where Auston Matthews and William Nylander solved Nikita Tolopilo in the skills competition. Considering that the Maple Leafs held 2.6 percent odds of making the playoffs prior to Saturday’s slate, in conjunction with the Canucks clearly looking towards this summer’s draft, it was a pyrrhic victory.

After losing six consecutive games, Saturday’s victory perhaps constitutes a morale boost for the Maple Leafs, with two games remaining ont their road before the Olympic break. There are 27 games remaining, and the Maple Leafs are now looking to operate as true sellers at the deadline for the first time in the Matthews Era, as confirmed by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman during Saturday’s broadcast.

We’re not trying to be pessimistic for the sake of it, but it’s tough to spin Saturday’s victory in any direction. If you’re firmly aboard the idea that the Maple Leafs should be angling towards a bottom-five finish, in hopes of recouping their first-round pick from the Boston Bruins, picking up two points in any event isn’t beneficial towards the goal. That’s an impossible sell to any professional athlete, so if you’re in the camp that still hopes the Leafs win out, regardless of intended medium and long-term planning, a shootout victory over the Canucks isn’t satisfying. They are perhaps the lone team in the NHL that the Maple Leafs ought to defeat on their superior talent level, and that appeared to be case on Saturday night.

Toronto’s porous defence continued to surrender several odd-man rushes. Morgan Rielly, who sustained an upper-body injury, and did not return for the third period, once again afforded the opponent way too much space by pinching aggressively and not accounting for the Canucks overflowing off the rush. Rielly has been on the ice for a league-worst 63 goals at 5-on-5, but the Maple Leafs also don’t have an immediate answer as an upgrade on their longest-tenured player. We’re not going to criticize injured players, but Rielly’s performance to date is fair game, and now the Maple Leafs will have to wait and see how serious the ailment is.

Marshall Rifai made his season debut and struggled badly, making several key mistakes with the puck. Rifai should’ve been in the lineup a lot earlier, and now it’s incumbent upon Craig Berube to see how he experiments with the line combinations, perhaps with an eye towards the future, as the Maple Leafs are embarked upon a seemingly impossible climb.