The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Blues, deserved the win, took a loss.

The Toronto Maple Leafs feel back to a 6-6, .500 record (technically 6-5-1) with a 4-2 loss to the St. Louis Blues last night.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have now lost twice to new coach Craig Berube’s former team already this year. Though while they played badly in their first loss, the Leafs were the better team in this game and did not deserve to lose.

Sometimes hockey is a weird game and the best team doesn’t always win. Last night was one of those nights for the Leafs.

It’s not like they played perefectly and got screwed over in some kind of nearly inconcievable way or anything, but they did play a solid 60 minutes and they did deserve a better outcome – especially hard luck goalie Joseph Woll. (stats naturalstattrick.com).

The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Blues, deserved the win, took a loss.

It’s hard to feel sorry for the Leafs coach when he keeps dressing Ryan Reaves and healthy-scratching Nick Robertson, and when he refused to play one of his best defenseman – Timothy Liljegren – for reasons that are totally inexplicable. And yet, the Leafs did deserve to win last night.

The Leafs absolutely dominated the first and third periods, and one of the Blue’s goals went in off a skate, while the other two were just fluke shots through traffic that the goalie couldn’t see.

No blame to Joseph Woll at all for this one – in fact, he’s played two awesome games this week. The Leafs goaltending is the best thing they’ve got going for them at this point, and if it keeps up they will be one of the best teams in the NHL.

The power-play still sucks, but I officially don’t care – sure it was probably the reason they lost last night, or at least of them, but this team has enough of the league’s best offensive players that it’s perfectly reasonable to assume it will work itself out eventually.

The Leafs might have a bad power-play right now, but by using mostly all the same players, it will eventually go back to being among the best in the NHL, so it’s really not worth getting excited about.

The Leafs, who aren’t scoring nearly enough and are 13th in total goals scored this season, would be well-advised to dress Nick Robertson since he’s one of their most talented offensive players. But otherwise, what can you say about last night’s game?

If Tavares doesn’t hit the post in the first period, they probably win the game. If they score more than one goal in the first – and they could have had six – they win the game.

The Leafs do need to execute and win these games, but it’s hard to mad about how they’re playing – despite all the weird roster decisions and the fact that Matthews isn’t producing and the power-play stinks, they are still .500 and deserving of a much better record. This bodes well for future results.