Our preview asked whether Utah could score four on Sergei Bobrovsky, since it was 9-0-0 when it scored four and 0-6-0 when it didn't. It scored three and won anyway, 3-2 in Toronto, the first time this season Utah has won a game with fewer than four goals. We picked Utah 4, Toronto 3: the right team, one goal high on both sides. We also said Toronto's penalty kill, second in the league, would push Utah's scoring to five-on-five. It didn't. Utah went 2-for-3 on the power play against a kill that had allowed five goals in 56 times shorthanded, and its only five-on-five goal came from a defenseman.
What we'd keep from this game is a decision Utah made before puck drop. Cole Bagley of KSL Sports posted the new lines about half an hour before: Anders Lee and Barrett Hayton with Clayton Keller, and Nick Schmaltz centering Jack McBain and Dylan Guenther. The preview's case was that Utah's five-on-five goals were going missing in the Keller-Schmaltz minutes: with Keller on the ice at five-on-five in the 11 games we had shift charts for, Utah was outscored 11-4. Across those 11 games, Keller, Hayton and Lee had been on the ice together at five-on-five for nine seconds. On Tuesday they played about 10 minutes together, and they were Utah's best line.
The new line won its minutes
With Keller on the ice at five-on-five (12 minutes, about 10 of them with Hayton and Lee both on the ice), Utah outshot Toronto 10-4 and outscored it 1-0. In the rest of the five-on-five minutes, Toronto outshot Utah 19-17 and outscored it 2-0. Utah's one five-on-five goal was Andrew Peeke's wrist shot from about 48 feet at 13:42 of the second, four seconds after Bobrovsky stopped a Keller shot, with Keller and Lee assisting. It was Peeke's second of the season.
The beat agrees on the top line. Chase Beardsley of The Hockey News called it "pretty noticeable" and gave Hayton's screen in front of Bobrovsky part of the credit for Peeke's goal. Where we part ways is the other new line. Beardsley wrote that "the Jack McBain-Nick Schmaltz-Dylan Guenther line was noticeable every time they were on the ice, with Guenther and Schmaltz able to get pucks to the net and McBain able to find any loose change in front while also causing a little bit of chaos." It was noticeable in the first period, when Utah out-attempted Toronto 9-2 with Schmaltz on at five-on-five. After that it wasn't. Over the game, with him on at five-on-five, Utah was outshot 7-4 and out-attempted 14-13, he was on the ice for Jack Roslovic's first goal at 10:20 of the second, and in the third Toronto had all seven attempts. That line's two goals both came on the power play. Logan Cooley, Vincent Trocheck and Lawson Crouse saw a lot of Auston Matthews' line and broke even, 10-10 in shots on goal with Cooley on.
"I think anyone can play with anyone on this team," Schmaltz said after the game, per The Hockey News. On this evidence, Keller can play with Hayton and Lee. One caveat on all of it: Toronto was home for the first time after a four-game trip, and Matthews said afterward, per NHL.com, "We just didn't really have our legs or the energy needed to compete." So the new line won its minutes against a team that admitted it was flat for half the night, and Montreal will tell us more.
Utah fans took a period to come around. Midway through the first, one wrote on X, "We need to turn Clayton Keller off and back on again." In the last minutes of the game another wrote, "Keller is looking a lot better tonight. Passes are more crisp and his shots have more intention behind them." Keller finished with three assists and five shots on goal, both team highs, and has 21 points (4 goals, 17 assists).
The old pair still worked together, on the power play. Keller and Schmaltz were both out for Guenther's goal with 13 seconds left in the first, a snap shot from about 46 feet, 49 seconds into Roslovic's hooking minor. Then Keller set up Schmaltz's winner at 13:12 of the third: Bobrovsky stopped Keller from about 22 feet, and three seconds later Schmaltz put the rebound in on the backhand from about three feet, 90 seconds into Darren Raddysh's cross-checking minor. Mikhail Sergachev assisted on both power-play goals, which stretched his point streak to eight games, per NHL.com's notes. NHL.com also has Utah leading the league with 20 power-play goals. Keller and Schmaltz apart at five-on-five and together on the power play is the setup we'd keep for Montreal.
The third period belonged to Toronto, and to Cossa
This wasn't a complete game. Toronto outshot Utah 12-6 in the third period, and 36-17 in shot attempts by our count of the play-by-play. After a shot at 2:52, Utah went 9 minutes and 34 seconds without another shot on goal. Toronto had seven in a row in that stretch, the last of them Roslovic's backhand from about nine feet at 9:05 that tied it 2-2. The new line didn't fix that: with Keller on at five-on-five in the third, Toronto outshot Utah 1-0. Utah's next shot on goal came 44 seconds into its power play. André Tourigny didn't pretend otherwise. "They had a push in the third and we were on our heels a little bit and we will learn a lot from that," Utah's coach said, per NHL.com.
That's the period Sebastian Cossa won. He stopped 11 of 12 in the third and 27 of 29 overall. Over the whole game, Toronto had five shots on goal from 11 feet or closer, four of them by Matthews (from about 6, 7, 10 and 11 feet), and Cossa stopped all four of his; Roslovic's tying goal was the one that got through. After Schmaltz scored, Toronto got three shots on goal in the last 6:48, two of them with Bobrovsky pulled for an extra attacker. Cossa's season save percentage is now .875 (98 of 112), and Karel Vejmelka's is .868 (244 of 281), by the shots and goals the NHL lists.
"Key saves at key moments," Tourigny said, per the Deseret News. Peeke, in the same story, said Cossa made "clutch saves at crucial moments." Utah fans stayed with him through the third. "I ain't even mad. Cossa has been infinitely better than Vejmelka would have been," one wrote on X. Brogan Houston of the Deseret News wrote on X that "Sebastian Cossa is looking more and more settled in (although he did get lucky at the end)."
Houston's game story goes further. Its headline asks whether the Mammoth just found the answer to their goalie problems, and he wrote that the rookie "is beginning to look like the answer." Cossa is 4-1 in his five starts with three straight wins. But the season numbers say there isn't much of a gap to settle yet: .875 for Cossa and .868 for Vejmelka. What Cossa has is the hot hand. Beardsley expects Vejmelka to start in Montreal. We'd start Cossa, and we wouldn't hand him the net on one start.
Hayton, twice
Hayton was in the middle of the night's other argument. Leafs writers and fans on X said he interfered with Bobrovsky on Peeke's goal. The goal stood, and the play-by-play shows no challenge or review. At 17:20 of the second, NHL.com says, Lee put one in that was waved off for goaltender interference on Hayton. Beardsley described it on X as a puck Lee batted out of the air, waved off right away. "For the second time this period, Barrett Hayton makes contact with Sergei Bobrovsky as a puck goes in," Houston wrote on X.
Toronto coach Jim Hiller explained why the Leafs let the first one go. "Bobrovsky was in the white (ice) but he got wiped right out," he said, per NHL.com. "The rule is tricky to interpret, it really is. We went through it, we've seen a lot of these, and we decided that because he was in the white, we weren't going to challenge." Put that next to NHL.com's account of the second one, that Hayton "interfered with Bobrovsky in the goal crease," and our reading is that the two calls came down to where Bobrovsky was standing: outside the crease for Peeke's goal, in it for Lee's. One Utah fan on X pinned the second one on Hayton, for taking a highlight goal away from his own linemate. We haven't seen a replay we could judge either call from, so we won't rule on them, but Toronto's own bench didn't think it had a winning challenge on the first.
What it changes
Utah is 10-6-0 with 20 points, second in the Central, five points behind Minnesota, which has played a game more. It's 2-0 against Toronto this season after the 5-4 home win on Oct. 13. And it held an opponent under three goals for the first time since Oct. 15 at Edmonton, after seven straight games allowing three or more.
It also kept a pattern going. NHL.com pointed out that Utah has alternated wins and losses for nine straight games, starting Oct. 15, and The Hockey News that it's 6-0-0 after a loss. Its longest winning streak this season is three games.
Next is Thursday at Montreal, 5:00 PM MT, game four of six on the road (schedule). That's the real test of the line change: does Keller stay with Hayton and Lee, and can Utah win two in a row for the first time since Oct. 13 and 15?
Tusks up.
Sources: NHL box score, play-by-play, shift charts, standings and schedule. Shots on goal and attempts by period and strength, shot distances (approximate, from the NHL's coordinates), on-ice splits and line minutes, and save percentages (shots minus goals) are our counts from the NHL's data. Lines from Cole Bagley, KSL Sports, on X; Brogan Houston, Deseret News, on X (Hayton, final); Chase Beardsley, The Hockey News, on X. Postgame quotes and notes from NHL.com's recap, Brogan Houston's Deseret News game story and Chase Beardsley's Hockey News recap. Season save percentages from the NHL's goalie game logs. Fan posts from X during the game. Our preview and Flyers recap.