In Toronto, Auston Matthews struck for two goals as the Maple Leafs took a 5-3 win over the visiting Buffalo Sabres on Tuesday.
The Leafs moved to 17-14-4 with the win.
“In the first half of the game we did a lot of good things on the cycle earning some offense, but we’d like to be a little better in the second half of the game,” John Tavares said. “As we start to play with some more leads, obviously that’s a good sign and something we want to keep doing. We want to continue to control the game and make our opponent defend, but overall we stuck with it so it was a good win.”
Frederik Andersen made 27 saves in the win.
Buffalo fell behind 3-0 before getting their offense going, but could no closer than 3-2 and 4-3 before the end.
Jack Eichel had a goal to extend his point streak to 17 games.
“I think the battle level probably wasn’t there,” Eichel said. “They were desperate, they came out hard. Obviously you got to give them credit, they played well. We didn’t execute our game as well as we wanted to in the beginning, made a couple errors. They made us pay.”
Rasmus Dahlin and Kyle Okposo also scored for the Sabres.
“I’m disappointed that we didn’t make more of a game of it early because you could see when we made the push and we got to our game we found our legs. There was a real chance to take points here tonight,” Sabres coach Ralph Krueger said. “That speaks for the character of the group. We can recover within a game so that’s something to build on.”
Frederik Gauthier and Dmytro Timashov scored for the Maple Leafs, and Ilya Mikheyev added a shorthanded goal late in the third period to seal the victory.
“Playing with the lead, getting the lead, there were a lot of positives that we saw but I still think there’s a long way for the team to go,” Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said. “We’re still nowhere near what I think we’re capable of.”
[WATCH: All Sabres vs. Maple Leafs highlights]
Linus Ullmark made 28 saves in the loss.
“I felt we didn’t really get the forecheck going,” The Sabres’ Victor Olofsson said. ” I felt like they came out really easy. We didn’t get enough pucks deep on them. I felt we could’ve probably stopped them in our D zone too. We got running around a little bit too much. I thought we kind of did a good job with it in the third. It’s a really skilled team obviously and I think that it really starts with the forecheck. If you can’t slow them down right away they’re really able to come with speed.”
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