After years of anticipation, the wait is almost over. The NHL is back at the Olympics.
There were a lot of moving parts to the latest edition of Leafs Morning Take. As mentioned, we’ll be scaling down our programming a bit to take a breather during the Milan Games. With that in mind, Tuesday’s episode came partially from Montego Bay, Jamaica, where I will be situated for the next week. We kicked things off with some conversation around William Nylander. After playing three games in four nights coming off a groin injury heading into the Olympic break, the winger didn’t practice for Sweden on Tuesday due to maintenance. With any injury, there’s always some semblance of concern, especially when taking into account that it’s a groin.
At any rate, we spent a good portion of the podcast previewing the men’s tournament. Both Canada and the United States will get underway on Thursday while Sweden will open on Wednesday against the host Italians. Just like he did at the 4 Nations, Auston Matthews will dawn the captaincy for the U.S. squad as they look to atone for their loss last February. Dissimilar to last year’s best on best tournament, Matthews has looked healthy lately, and we think it could be a big tournament for the Maple Leafs captain. It looks like he will start on a line with Jake Guentzel and Matthew Boldy.
Meantime, Canada has some serious depth. How about rolling McDavid, MacKinnon, and Crosby up the middle? How are ya? Talk about a matchup night. Indisputably, Canada should be looked as favourites to win Gold. That said, everything will stem around their crease and back-end. Can they get some timely saves? How will their d-corps hold up against some of the NHL’s most talented players? It’s up to Jon Cooper to figure out the answers to those questions. Canada kicks things off with Czechia on Thursday.
Further, shoutout to Zack Phillips for hopping aboard to help out after I momentarily lost power here in Jamaica. Zack sticked around for the rest of the show. We got his thoughts on the Milan Games before ultimately transitioning to some Leafs talk. We got what we thinks the Leafs should do prior to the March 6th trade deadline. Also, we debated Darren Raddysh, who’s having a monster season for Tampa. The Toronto native is slated to become an unrestricted free agent on July 1, so naturally we discussed the potential of the Leafs becoming a suitor —provided he gets to market.
We’ll be back on Friday for another edition of Leafs Morning Take. Firstly, we recap Canada/Czechia before previewing Canada/Switzerland.