Mitch Marner heats up just in time for Maple Leafs and Team Canada: Monday Morning Leafs Report

Mitch Marner played his best game of the season for the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday.

He logged a team-high 24 minutes.

He scored the overtime winner moments after he disrupted hockeys most inevitable two-on-one by somehow batting down Leon Draisaitl s passing attempt to Connor McDavid .

He became the 16th Leaf to score 200 goals.

Marner pickpocketed McDavid in the first period to spur the Leafs first goal against the Edmonton Oilers .

In the nearly 13 minutes he went head-to-head with McDavid at five-on-five, the Leafs won almost 65 percent of expected goals.

He did Marner things defensively: He was also a menace on the penalty kill, particularly during Ryan Reaves five-minute major.

At one point, Marner stole the puck just inside his own blue line, raced down the ice and then wisely threw a shot on net Stuart Skinner had no choice but to freeze, forcing the Oilers into a defensive zone faceoff on their own power play.

Advertisement The Leafs have somehow won five of six games without Auston Matthews .

Marner has multi-point games in all five wins .

In addition to Saturdays OT winner, Marner scored the game-tying goal with less than a minute left in regulation when the Leafs beat the Washington Capitals , also in OT.

Marner is on pace for what would be a career-best 104 points.

Happy with how things are going, he told me after a practice last week.

And yet it feels like theres still a lot of room for growth for him this season.

Marner didnt have his usual slow start, but he didnt really start on a heater either.

In 11 games in October, he scored once and registered 11 assists.

So far in November, he has five goals and 12 points in eight games, mostly without Matthews.

Whats really been missing for Marner (and the Leafs) is five-on-five offence, the biggest source of growth potential.

Marner is producing right around two points per 60 minutes at five-on-five so far (2.04 to be exact), his worst clip since his second season with the Leafs and a pretty steep drop-off from the last few seasons: 2020-21 : 3.1 2021-22 : 3.5 2022-23 : 2.8 2023-24 : 2.7 Marner is among the very best five-on-five point producers around.

In his four previous seasons, he registered 204 five-on-five points.

Three players league-wide had more: McDavid (245), Nathan MacKinnon (228) and Matthews (223).

He has only one five-on-five point in the last seven games.

I still think we can do a little better job of just moving the puck east-west a little bit, using our D, using the F3, trying to exploit people from their net and then using the slot as ours, Marner explained to me.

Now in this league, I feel like a lot of teams pressure with one guy and then the second guy comes in pretty quickly.

The solution, Marner went on, was to move it quickly to someone else the instant that second defender converged.

Advertisement As always, Marner could still look for his own shot more than he does.

He could stand to be more selfish, a lot more selfish.

He has only six shots more at five-on-five this season than Max Pacioretty , who has played almost 130 fewer minutes.

Marner conceded that playing with Matthews tends to lull him into passing far more than shooting.

Definitely, he said.

I think thats in the mind a lot as well.

And while youd think Matthews absence would lead to more shots for Marner, its not been the case even a little: Marner has one five-on-five shot, total , in the last six games without Matthews.

The only Leaf with less is Simon Benoit , who has none.

(Marner has eight attempts in that time, only three more than Reaves.) Marner has scored only two five-on-five goals all season.

He has two power-play goals, one shorthanded goal and one three-on-three goal (that OT winner over the weekend).

When we spoke at training camp, Marner said he wanted to be more dynamic as both a playmaker and scorer this season.

Doing so as a scorer meant just realizing that the perfect play, always, could be just throwing one to the net and getting a bounce or two, and it could go in, it could make a rebound or something like that.

That, he believed, would help him on the dynamic front as a playmaker.

Making goalies play me as a shooter more than a passer all the time, he said, and respect that.

If he wasnt a lock for Team Canada heading into the season (and he may have been; count down the forwards who should be there and youll get to Marner fairly quickly), his play of late makes him one now.

The roster deadline for the 4 Nations Face-Off is Dec.

2.

Marner wants to be there.

Itd be very cool to represent your country and be able to play with some amazing players, he said.

But not thinking about it at all, just focused on here.

Advertisement With the Leafs, that is.

Points 1.

I asked Marner whether Craig Berubes style had required some adjustment for him, like dumping in the puck more often: I think you still have that freedom, if you have space and time, to carry the puck in.

But its not always the case in every scenario.

2.

The Leafs seem to have found something in the line of Marner, Bobby McMann and John Tavares .

Do they keep that group intact when Matthews is ready to play? In other words, do they keep Matthews and Marner apart for a top six that looks like this? Knies Matthews Nylander McMann Tavares Marner 3.

McManns speed popped in his two-goal game against the Oilers on Saturday.

McMann has six bursts of at least 35 kilometres an hour this season and 58 bursts of 32-35 km/hr.

Both put him in the NHL s 97th percentile, making McMann one of the quickest players around.

(Per the NHL, Bursts measure the number of times a skater achieved a sustained speed above a given threshold.) 4.

Max Domi has gone 13 straight games without a point.

The Leafs are trying to make his life easier by leaning more on David Kampf , particularly for quicksand duty.

In his first 15 games this season, Kampf lined up for 23 five-on-five draws in the defensive zone, the second-fewest on the team and 38(!) less than Domi.

In just the last three games, Kampf has been sent out for 14 such faceoffs, which trails only the makeshift top line of Marner, McMann and Tavares.

Kampf logged nearly as much five-on-five time on Saturday (11:46) as Domi (12:31).

He even saw some action against McDavid.

It remains to be seen if that trend continues when Matthews returns.

5.

Part of that will come down to this: Who does Berube prefer to play third-line centre? Domi has obviously struggled in the middle.

Hes playing out of position.

The Leafs think of him as a winger first, but sliding him to the wing and moving Kampf up comes with its own problems namely, a third line that will struggle to generate any offence, on top of a fourth line that wont help much at all on that front.

The three members of the Leafs third line that started Saturdays game Kampf between Nick Robertson and Pontus Holmberg have a total of one goal between them this season.

Advertisement And then, theres this question: If Kampf is the 3C, where does Domi go? 6.

What happened to Holmbergs modest (but still helpful) offensive game? In his first two seasons with the Leafs, Holmberg collected 12 goals and 30 points in 91 games, not bad for a guy playing only 11 minutes a night.

This season, playing 12.5 minutes per game, Holmberg hasnt scored and has registered only two assists.

7.

The Leafs have generated just one goal total at five-on-five in the 178 minutes Holmberg has been on the ice.

Thats equal to 0.34 goals per 60 minutes, second lowest among the more than 300 NHL forwards who have logged at least 150 five-on-five minutes this season only Nashvilles Jonathan Marchessault , somehow, has been worse.

8.

Jani Hakanpaa s biggest contribution to the Leafs might end up coming on the penalty kill.

In the two seasons before this one, only two players in the league Esa Lindell and David Savard logged more time per game shorthanded than Hakanpaa (3:16).

With Jake McCabe and Chris Tanev rocking it on the first pair, Hakanpaa almost certainly wont play much.

But he will be a factor there, likely pushing Conor Timmins into a lesser role.

GO DEEPER The Maple Leafs changed their plan on defence and unlocked a defensive monster 9.

Minute totals for William Nylander in the last four games: 20:38, 21:48, 22:16, 21:18.

Stock watch Its been a roller-coaster kind of year so far for McMann.

A healthy scratch on opening night.

Three goals in two games when he made it into the lineup.

Then a major drop-off that led to McMann playing eight minutes in Boston on Oct.

26 amid an 11-game point drought.

And now, another high.

The opening-night healthy scratch is currently playing the role of first-line left winger and ranks fourth (tied with Marner) on the Leafs with six goals.

McMann logged a career high of more than 19 minutes against Edmonton.

He scored twice with his speed and hustle.

Mann, that guy's fast! pic.twitter.com/MknHQfSqK2 Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) November 17, 2024 McMann tends to score in flurries like that.

(Seven of his 15 goals last season came in a five-game stretch.) The challenge for him, the one that will determine what exactly his ceiling is in the NHL, will be smoothing out those rougher patches.

Hakanpaas return has pushed Benoit, not Timmins, out of the lineup.

Advertisement The Leafs have lost Benoits minutes definitively this season (39 percent expected goals, which is partly about his usage) and hes no longer essential on the PK with Hakanpaa around.

This is by no means settled.

Timmins will have to keep playing well, in the eyes of the coaching staff, to hold Benoit off.

Things I Think I Think What can we make of the Leafs play without Matthews? The results: 4-0 win over Boston 3-1 win over Detroit 4-1 win over Montreal 3-0 loss to Ottawa 4-3 OT win over Washington 4-3 OT win over Edmonton It hasnt been dominant or pretty.

A couple of those opponents were pretty lacklustre.

It took some fortunate bounces to get those two last wins.

And the Leafs have actually been outscored (6-7) and outpossessed (224-301) at five-on-five.

But to go 5-1-0 without the best player on the team, however it looks and however it gets done, is something to be proud of.

Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick , Hockey Reference , Evolving Hockey and NHL Edge (Top photo of Mitch Marner: Patrick Smith / Getty Images).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.