The Leafs are meddling in the western wild card race some more tonight as they play the Kings on HNIC. Meanwhile the Thursday game that they were supposed to win eliminated them from the playoffs.

Oliver Ekman-Larsson is doubtful for today, and will be a couple of days getting back in the lineup. The Leafs have an extra defender with them, so they don't have to make a move before they come home.

We have a rare three days off after this game tonight, and then the schedule slams hard. If the Leafs were in the playoffs, this would be a very tough period to negotiate, and yes, this schedule is still very bad. The final five games start on Wednesday and are crammed into eight days.

Miroslav Holinka played last night:

Ben Danford won't start playing until sometime towards the end of next week.

Some predictable things here with every example relating directly to the Leafs in some way:

Friday Four: What can Maple Leafs learn from recent retools?
With the Maple Leafs declaring they are not rebuilding, Michael Amato takes a look at a few teams who have retooled recently and what elements or strategies they used to make it successful.
Sportsnet.caMichael Amato

This is worth a listen instead of just going on what other people fixed on:

32 Thoughts: The Podcast
Hockey fans already know the name, but this is not the blog. From Sportsnet, 32 Thoughts: The Podcast with NHL Insider Elliotte Friedman & Kyle Bukauskas is a weekly deep dive into the biggest news and interviews from the hockey world.
Sportsnet.ca

Gotta say though, it is weird, weird, weird to look up and see PPP at the top of the page and have a management change that includes serious talk of data use, evidence-based decisions, gushing about Tulsky and, in the above, a lot of interest in Haley Wickenheiser taking a bigger role, and have that be a hard sell.

One thing hasn't changed though, we are about to get a whole hell of a lot of let's trade Nylander articles. Buddy up there looking at "retools" thinks he's polarizing. Which is an interesting part of 32 Thoughts. Elliotte Friedman talks about teams not being afraid of their fans, and he's talking about making big deals, but it's a good point to consider particularly with someone who is allegedly polarizing. Part of evidence-based decision making is to tune all of that out, media, pundits, fans.

Like Kypreos – go find it if you want to – thinking Morgan Rielly is going to get traded with 50% retained salary, the Leafs need to ignore this and Kypreos needs new material.

Which isn't to say they are not going to make any trades. It seems likely they will, but that's well down the road. Let's just wait for who blows out of the playoffs like a hurricane hit them and might be rethinking their own status before we decide which deals must be made and who is or is not available.

By my reckoning it's minimum one month before the earliest possible hiring date, and that's a lot of time for "names that are out there" stories, fantasy trades of guys with NMCs and pretty soon, no hockey in Canada but the Habs and the Oilers.

And before then there are six more games. Go out there and lose, tonight, guys, we know you can.

Some sort of preview will be out later.

From The Branches