The Toronto Maple Leafs were more engaged and involved following a 7-1 drubbing against Pittsburgh last weekend, but were once again undone by a poor second period, as the Carolina Hurricanes scored three times in the middle frame in a 4-1 victory at PNC Arena on Monday.
Auston Matthews scored his first of the season and Jack Campbell made 32 saves for Toronto, who have lost four games in a row and continue to struggle to get on track two weeks into the 2021-22 campaign.
Head coach Sheldon Keefe scrambled his forward lines in hopes of finding a spark, moving Michael Bunting and William Nylander to the top line with Matthews, Alex Kerfoot and Mitch Marner alongside John Tavares, Pierre Engvall up with the checking combo of David Kampf and Ondrej Kase and shifting Nick Ritchie to the fourth line with Jason Spezza and Wayne Simmonds, but there was little or no change against the tight-checking Canes.
“This is a tough one to really analyze because of how difficult Carolina made it. I thought there was times for sure – Tavares and Mitch, especially – I thought those guys moved around pretty well.” Keefe said. “It just shows we’ve got another level that we need to get to, but like I said, I thought we were a lot better in a lot of areas tonight than we have been the last couple of games, but still not to the level necessary to compete with a team like that the way we need to.”
Campbell played well in preserving a precarious one-goal lead through the first half of the game, but goals from Sebastian Aho and Steven Lorentz in a span of 2:23 in the second erased the Toronto advantage. The Leafs once again struggled to put together a coherent offensive attack, getting only 25 shots on Frederik Andersen and beating the former Leaf only once on Matthews wraparound early in the first.
With every setback early in the season coming after their loss to Montreal last May, the pressure on the Leafs continues to ramp up, but there does not seem to be any immediate answer other than the club’s core players playing up to expectations.
Through seven games, Toronto has a -10 goal differential, is averaging less than two goals per game, and is 3-for-22 on the power play (26th -13.6%). With the club playing at best average defensively, that formula is not conducive to winning.
“We (have to) put this one behind us and we move on to Chicago.” Matthews said after the game. “(It’s) not the result that we wanted but I think there’s things that we can take from a competitive stand point that we can move forward with positively, but obviously losing sucks.
Especially when you lose a couple in a row it’s not great feeling but obviously for us we just want to clean up some aspects of our game and put our heads down and just keep working.”
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