Really, it’s in the Flyers best interest to lose, so naturally they’ll play their little hearts out.
Toronto Maple Leafs vs Philadelphia Flyers
7 pm on TSN4, NBCSP
The Maple Leafs take on the Flyers, who have very successfully dived to the bottom of the league lately. They enter tonight’s game in fourth place in the race for the ocean floor by points percentage. They’re only one point better than Seattle, and just need to not win to get down into lottery country.
Them
The Flyers have lost their last five games, as they prepare for the draft. There’s no shame in it. When your marquee player leaves you after 1,000 games and his whole career on your team, you know you’re in the bottom of the rebuild. And a -82 goal differential now doesn’t mean you won’t be at least second last in the Metro next year. So take heart, Flyer’s fans.
This is the team from morning skate via Daily Faceoff:
Noah Cates – Kevin Hayes – Travis Konecny
James van Riemsdyk – Scott Laughton – Bobby Brink
Joel Farabee – Morgan Frost – Owen Tippett
Oskar Lindblom – Nate Thompson – Zack MacEwen
Ivan Provorov – Travis Sanheim
Egor Zamula – Kevin Connauton
Keith Yandle – Ronnie Attard
Martin Jones – confirmed starter
Felix Sandström
The Flyers too hurt to play are actually a fairly impressive roster, but now is the time for the young stars like Brink and Farabee to shine. Old man Konecny can show them the ropes.
They are some very good players on this team, and the Leafs are due for a stinker, so anything is possible.
Us
Sheldon Keefe is in his experimental phase, and unfortunately that doesn’t mean he’s going to cut an album of trance covers of Bob Dylan.
Sheldon Keefe says he plans to experiment a bit more with Leafs forward lines tonight but Nylander, Kerfoot & Engvall will remain together @TSN_Edge
— Mark Masters (@markhmasters) April 19, 2022
Auston Matthews is still not playing so taking last night’s lines as the starting point that Keefe can experiment with — anyone else remember mixing paint in elementary school and always ending up with a kind of muddy grey? Anyhow:
Ilya Mikheyev – John Tavares – Mitch Marner
William Nylander – Alexander Kerfoot – Pierre Engvall
Michael Bunting – David Kämpf – Colin Blackwell
Nick Abruzzese – Jason Spezza – Wayne Simmonds
Morgan Rielly – Ilya Lyubushkin
T.J. Brodie – Justin Holl
Mark Giordano – Timothy Liljegren
Jack Campbell – confirmed starter
Erik Källgren
We saw some flipping of Mikheyev and Bunting in the Sunday game, so expect that. Lyubushkin and Liljegren can also be swapped. We might see Clifford in for someone on that fourth line.
The Game
Moneypuck says 78.4% the Leafs take the Flyers and 76.8% the Lightning take the Red Wings. Check back at 10:30 or so to see who fulfilled their probable destiny and who didn’t.