Auston Matthews has become almost unstoppable this season. On Saturday night in Montreal, he scored twice and had four points in a 5-3 Toronto Maple Leafs’ win over the Canadiens.
“I think night in and night out the recipe for our success is us competing and working hard and really just working to get that puck back,” Matthews said. “I think we’ve just been focused on that and it’s been working. We’re winning games right now, which is the most important thing. As long as we’re winning, I’m happy, we’re all happy. We just want to continue that.”
Frederik Andersen made 30 saves for the win.
Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Paul Byron and Tyler Toffoli were the Montreal strikers.
The Habs dropped to 9-5-2.
“We gave them the win with our mistakes,” Canadiens head coach Claude Julien said. “The decisions we made are what cost us the game.”
Mitchell Marner had a goal and three points for the Leafs.
“I think when our line comes out of the zone with the puck in our hands we’re feeling pretty confident that we can do some pretty good things in the offensive zone,” Marner said. “We just want to keep working together, support each other, talk to each other.”
Alexander Kerfoot and Travis Boyd also scored for the Maple Leafs.
“I didn’t like the chaos that was the second period,” Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe said. “Once we got our lead, we’ve got to do a better job with that. In the third period we were really good in that regard and we just sucked the life out of the game, which is what you want to do when you’ve got a lead against a team like this, especially a fresh team that we knew was going to have lots of legs in the third period.
“We needed to slow the game down, and the guys did a good job of that.”
Carey Price made 22 saves. in the loss.
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