Gameday 6: Penguins @ Leafs

Penguins @ Leafs

Scotiabank Arena – Toronto, ON

7:00PM Eastern – AT&T Sports Network

The Penguins kick off a Canadian road trip that will span the next 10 days as they head to Toronto to tangle with a very specific type of Leafs in what shapes up to be a wide open matchup between two of the league’s most powerful offenses.

The problem, though, is that only one of these two team’s offenses has been as advertised. The Leafs have sprinted out to a 6-1-0 record, and Auston Matthews has yet to play a game in the 2018-19 season where he has recorded less than 2 points. He literally can’t stop scoring. Three other Leafs sit in the top-6 in scoring behind him.

The Penguins, on the other hand, with the exception of the wild opener where they notched 7 against the Capitals, have struggled to a 1-1-2 record while posting 10 goals across those 4 games.  Their play has looked lackadaisical at times, and despite the extended rest they’ve gotten in a year where they didn’t win the Cup, an October malaise could turn the road forward in the season into a treacherous one as these long road trips are never easy to collect points. The Penguins can sustain a bad October, and it’s good to get the Western Canada trip off the slate early, but they’ll do well to stockpile some points on this jaunt.

That’s the plan, of course. The Pens showed enough resilience to squeeze a point out of the Vancouver Canucks on Tuesday night. They’ll hope to build on some of that momentum as they are likely to welcome Matt Murray back to the cage, despite Casey “The Smith” DeSmith’s outstanding performance in his absence.

Juuso Riikola gets thrown right into the fire as he lost this morning’s “Who gets to carry around Jack Johnson’s rotting corpse?” pool. The Penguins are super festive for Halloween.

Thankfully, the Derick Brassard-as-a-winger experiment seems to have met an abrupt and unceremonious end. The Penguins will shuffle Bryan Rust to the top line in a deserved reward for his solid play up and down the lineup. Brassard bumps back down to the third line in a configuration that looks like this:

Guentzel – Crosby – Rust

Hagelin – Malkin – Kessel

Simon – Brassard – Hornqvist

Sprong – Cullen – Sheahan

Dumoulin – Letang

Maatta – Oleksiak

Johnson – Riikola

Murray

It's Matt Murray vs. Freddie Andersen tonight in Toronto. Two goalies returning from injury.

— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) October 18, 2018

If there’s any team that’s got some hype around them, it’s the city that serves as hockey’s (actual) Mecca – Toronto and their Maple Leafs. For the first time in history, however, they may not be the most popular leafs in town.

Of course, the well documented summer which saw them land John Tavares has given them arguably the best center depth in the league, something that has been opined not only by pundits and Kool-Aid Drinkers, but also by the team who has had the best center depth in the league for about a decade.

The Leafs have done all of this in the absence of William Nylander, who is holding out to try and get some of John Tavares’ money. Not even a socialist economy allows that kind of sharing though, so Toronto may have a distribution of wealth problem down the line. This is a joke because no, Canada is not socialist.

Marleau – Matthews – Kapanen

Hyman – Tavares – Marner

Lindholm – Kadri – Brown

Leivo – Gauthier – Ennis

Rielly – Hainsey

Gardiner – Zaitsev

Dermott – Ozhiganov

Andersen

Smoke the Leafs.

Go Pens.