Maple Leafs shut out Golden Knights, win 3rd straight

Joseph Woll made 31 saves for his first shutout of the season, and the Toronto Maple Leafs defeated the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 at Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday.

“I think that’s winning hockey. I think that’s the way we are trending and trying to play more,” Woll said. “Especially when you have some of your biggest guys out, it’s really cool to see guys step in and step up and play to our system like that. It was a great effort.

“I think behind a great defensive effort, I played within my system. There were some different moments where the momentum was swinging both ways and in the second period we had a few penalty kills. It’s tough though for me to talk much about my game because sitting behind our effort tonight was pretty special.”

Fraser Minten scored his first NHL goal, and William Nylander had a goal and an assist for the Maple Leafs (12-6-2), who won their third straight game and are 6-1-0 in their past seven. Mitch Marner and John Tavares each had two assists.

Toronto was without injured forwards Auston Matthews (upper body), Max Domi (lower body), Max Pacioretty (lower body) and David Kampf (lower body) as well as forward Ryan Reaves, who was serving the first of a five-game suspension for an illegal check to the head of Darnell Nurse in a 4-3 overtime win against the Edmonton Oilers on Saturday.

“We played hard more than anything,” Maple Leafs coach Craig Berube said. “Resilient, battled and competed, it was a heavy game like we thought. I thought our guys did a real good job with the physicality part, grinding, being patient, not forcing things. Vegas is a very good team, they don’t give you a lot and you’ve got to play smart. I thought our guys played smart and it was a battle, though. We battled hard, really hard.”

Adin Hill made 23 saves for the Golden Knights (11-6-2), who are 2-3-1 in their past six games.

“There wasn’t a lot of rush opportunity tonight around the net,” Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy said. “I actually thought our 5-on-5 game was fine coming out of the second period but the third period was uncharacteristic of us, didn’t do much right. I thought we lost a lot of races and battles and the game changed on the penalty kill.”

The Maple Leafs went up 1-0 at 8:53 of the first period when Minten, who was making his season debut and playing his fifth NHL game, took Nylander’s backhand pass from below the goal line and shot low to the glove side from the slot.

“It was fun, it felt great,” Minten said. “I got a line change there and sometimes when you come off the bench on the rush they don’t really pick you up, so I just tried to stay in the quiet ice there. I know ‘Willy’ sees everything, so I just was waiting for something and he made a great pass.”

Vegas outshot Toronto 16-6 in the second period, when it was 0-for-2 on the power play.

“Our PK was doing a great job,” Nylander said. “Some guys blocked a lot of shots tonight like Steven Lorentz (team-high four) and obviously Woll doing an incredible job in net. Third period we kind of took back the game and were the better team out there.”

Nylander pushed it to 2-0 on the power play at 3:01 of the third period, 10 seconds after the Golden Knights had a short-handed 2-on-1 broken up when Maple Leafs defenseman Morgan Rielly poked the puck away from Vegas forward Brett Howden in the right face-off circle. Nylander took a pass from Marner on a 2-on-1 and shot past Hill’s glove from just below the right face-off dot.

“We have a 2-on-1 opportunity to tie the game, we don’t make a play and get caught up ice and give their two best players basically a practice 2-on-1,” Cassidy said. “That to me was a major turning point where we just have to be more responsible with our decision-making. Get the penalty kill and it’s a 1-0 game and get back to work.”

Pontus Holmberg scored into an empty net at 16:41 for the 3-0 final.

Toronto outshot Vegas 13-5 in the third.

The Maple Leafs are 6-1-0 since Matthews has been out and is 41-20-2 without him since he entered the NHL in 2016-17.

“Our captain went out and I thought that guys have to a man stepped up,” Berube said. “Some guys have played some real good hockey throughout this time. Tonight again, there’s different guys in different roles but they all stepped up and they’re all doing what they need to do to be successful out there.”

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