The Maple Leafs defeated the Jets last night but the big story of the game was Auston Matthews who injured his shoulder in the second period.

Recap: Auston Matthews injured as Maple Leafs power through the Jets in the 3rd
Auston Matthews will miss at least one game with a shoulder injury

That next Leafs game, which it’s comfirmed Matthews will miss, is on Monday against the Flames. The Leafs then get two days off before playing the Stars on Thursday, so it makes sense to take a wait and see approach before deciding whether or not he will be ready for that game. There’s no need to panic. Yet.

In the meantime we get to have fun speculation about how the lines will be shuffled by Babcock in response to the loss of his star center, and who will play on the top line Monday night.

There’s still no news on Nylander. It has been a week since the summit in Switzerland and highly credible media saying they thought a deal would have been done last week.

ICYMI
Here’s what we wrote about yesterday.

Sandin scores in his Marlies debut - Hardev
The Toronto Marlies defeated the Syracuse Crunch 4-1 in Ramus Sandin's AHL debut.

Who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s faking it in the NHL so far - Katya
A look at which teams in the NHL have started well, who haven’t, and who is hiding their real face behind a mask.

CWHL Recap: Thunder beat Rays 1-0, Furies lose to Canadiennes 1-0 - nafio and mediajunkie
Victoria Bach scores for the Thunder while Erin Ambrose scores on her old team.

Other News

Matthews wasn’t the only player injured last night. Jake Allen took a rough hit at the net and left the game.

What’s Next for Suter? - Hockey Wilderness
Ryan Suter just played in game 1,000, so what does that tell us about how much he has left in the tank?

Kotkaniemi is staying with the Montreal Canadiens - Eyes On The Prize
Jesperi Kotkaniemi, the 2018 third overall pick, has passed the nine game mark.

Breaking Down The Choas Around Faksa’s Fight Last Night - Defending Big D
There’s so much to unpack in this two minutes where Radek Faska starts a whole big mess.

The average age of TV viewers (excludes streaming) of NHL games rose from 33 to 49 over the 16 years ending at 2016. That’s an average rate of change of one year, each year, which is much faster than almost all other sports. Story on Marketwatch.com

Can Optical Illusions fool Artificial Intelligence too? - Ritsumeikan University
[Species: When confronted with the famous ‘Rotating Snake’ illusion, a variety of ‘Deep Neural Network’ learning and prediction software was fooled in a similar way to how humans are fooled by it. This begs the question of what other quirks of human minds AI learning software could develop. Could it develop a coginitive bias, ie. ignoring evidence its conclusion is wrong simply because it ‘believes’ it is always correct?]

From The Branches