The Maple Leafs started the season with a win last night, though it was at times a little touch and go, they pulled it off in style by the end of the game and got the two points. Here’s a link to our detailed recap of the game.

Game One Recap: Leafs win the season opener 2-1

Pierre Engvall has the honour of scoring the first goal of the Leafs season. And how about that laser shot from Nylander?

The game sheets show they played in front of a crowd of 18,493—the exact number to qualify as a sell out changes each year as MLSE will tweak the seating layout—but that’s close enough I would call it one. It’s the first since early 2020. Even the famous sun-tanned man was back behind the Leafs bench.

There’s very little time for the Leafs to make adjustments on the fly as they hit the road this morning to play the Ottawa Senators tonight in Kanata. The compressed season to fit in the break for the Olympics in February means many more back-to-back nights are to come.

This will also be the first TSN broadcast game of the season, so it will be blacked out on NHL Live and on cable TV in most of Ontario, unless you pay for that extra expensive TSN sports package.

Did you like our combined preview and GDT at 5:00 p.m.? We’re going to try that again tonight. Please leave feedback about the time in the comments.

Other News

Alex Ovechkin scored twice last night and passed Marcel Dionne to move into the fifth place in all-time NHL scoring. With the new US TV broadcast deals in place, last night was the debut of the NHL on TNT and that meant we got to see Wayne Gretzky interview Ovechkin after the game. Wayne is a bit stiff, but at least Ovi knows how to be funny in an interview.

Link: [https://www.nhl.com/video/ovechkin-interviewed-by-gretzky/c-9148498]
Editor’s Note: videos from NHL dot com seem to be auto-playing for some people so until we can figure out why on our back end, we’ll refrain from embedding them in our articles.

And d’awwww we miss you Zach!

From The Branches