The 29.2% most important night of Maple Leafs’ season originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
The Toronto Maple Leafs aren’t traveling the journey they would’ve hoped to be on at this point in the season.
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That makes the goals, the positives and the negatives a bit different than they normally would be in the stretch run.
And that makes Saturday night’s game with the St. Louis Blues a particularly important night, maybe the most important of the Maple Leafs’ season so far when you consider what happened around the rest of the NHL.
Toronto was crushed by the Blues, and it shifted the potential for the Maple Leafs to retain their draft pick considerably.
The Leafs’ first-round pick conveys to the Boston Bruins if it ends up outside the top-five.
And not only did the Leafs move to having a worse record than the Blues after St. Louis beat Toronto — Winnipeg also won Saturday in surprise fashion over Colorado, which made Toronto’s record worse than the Jets, too.
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The Maple Leafs entered the night with an 87.6% lottery chance of losing their pick to Boston. They ended it with that number at 58.4%. That 29.2% shift is in large part because, in moving into the fifth-worst points rate in the league, the Leafs now have a 24.2% chance of getting the No. 5 overall pick — that was zero when they sat with the eighth-worst points rate earlier in the week.
Obviously, none of this is ideal for Toronto. When the Leafs sent this pick and Fraser Minten to the Bruins for Brandon Carlo last season, they would’ve thought the selection would land outside the top-20.
Instead, it’s going to be a prime pick in a strong draft class. And given that Toronto needs a way to turn things around, keeping the pick could be crucial.
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