In Toronto, the Mitchell Marner show continued into its 21st game on Thursday night.
Marner pushed his streak to the new record with a marker in a four-goal middle frame for the Maple Leafs, who defeated the Los Angeles Kings, 5-0.
“I think it’s up there, for sure, especially against a team that does a great job really stopping people through the neutral zone, stopping speed, breaking out cleanly,” Marner said. “I thought in that second period we really took over the game, played our game, played with speed, pace, got the puck in, and I thought we did a good job of hemming them in and doing good line changes.”
Ilya Samsonov made 29 saves in the shutout.
“Unbelievable job for our whole team,” Samsonov said. “[Defensive] zone, offensive zone, we dominated today. It was a great job.”
The Leafs improved to 17-5-6.
“If the mental part is not there, there is no way the physical part is going to be there,” Los Angeles coach Todd McLellan said. “I thought we were light and slow in the first period, we didn’t win any races, and then when we did even come close to winning any of them, we were real light with our sticks, real light with body position and it just kept going all night.
“I’m actually quite disappointed because we haven’t used words like ‘light’ and ‘slow’ in a long, long time with our team. We’ve had some bad nights where we’ve made mistakes, but that was uncharacteristic of us and a little bit concerning.”
LA dropped to 14-11-4.
After a scoreless first period, the Leafs broke the game open, quickly,, scoring three times n a span of 68 seconds.
Pierre Engvall, David Kampf, and William Nylander hit for the rapid markers.
“We didn’t play nearly as good as we needed to, obviously,” Kings captain Anze Kopitar said. “Even in the first period it was 0-0, but in large part thanks to Quick. Quite frankly, all of the credit goes to him. We just weren’t good enough.”
Marner finished off the scoring in the middle frame with his strike for a 4-0 advantage headed to the third.
“I think it was a really, really good game,” Toronto center Auston Matthews said. “We obviously did a lot of really good things well, and two straight games not allowing a goal, a lot of credit goes to the way we’ve been defending and obviously the goaltending we’ve been getting from both Samsonov and Murray. I think just a full team effort all around. Those are the types of games you want to play and be consistently playing that way.”
Matthews scored midway through the third period for the 5-0 final.
“To be honest, I was a little uncertain about how we were going to come out here tonight,” Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said. “I just felt coming back from Dallas, it’s a longer road trip even though we only played two games. We just traveled back yesterday, not much of a recovery day for us, and then right into a game day today, but obviously the guys responded really well.”
Jonathan Quick made 36 saves in teh LA loss.
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