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The Maple Leafs scored their biggest win of the season on Monday night. Ron Chenoy / Imagn Images
DENVER — The odds were most definitely stacked against the Toronto Maple Leafs Monday night.
They were playing the best team in the league, for one thing, a Colorado Avalanche squad which hadn’t lost a game in regulation at home all season or a home game, period, since Oct. 23, winning an unthinkable 17 straight.
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The Leafs, after a Saturday night home game, also crossed time zones with almost no time to adjust, a hurdle made all the more challenging by the 8 p.m. local start time and the altitude in the Mile High City, which can make for exhausting conditions even without the frenetic speed of their opponent.
None of it mattered.
The Leafs overcame it all and scored by far their biggest victory of the season, beating the Avalanche 4-3 in overtime. They became only the third team all season to win in Denver, joining Dallas and Carolina, both of which scored their victories in October.
It was rare and special stuff, beating this Avalanche team at Ball Arena. It’s hard to think of it as anything other than a statement win for the Leafs, the kind that suggests their recent surge is the sign of something real and potentially meaningful.
“It shows that we can compete with anybody in the league if we play the right way and do the right things,” Leafs coach Craig Berube said after William Nylander’s franchise-record 16th overtime winner.
The win extended the Leafs’ points streak to 10 games (8-0-2) and, more importantly, vaulted them back into a playoff position for the first time since November.
So much about the victory was reminiscent of what’s been going on recently.
There were the shining stars, Nylander and Auston Matthews in particular. It was Matthews who pulled the Leafs in front during a four-on-four sequence in the third period with another vintage-looking wrist shot from 33 feet, the kind that’s suddenly become typical again for the 28-year-old.
AUSTON. MATTHEWS. @OREO | #LeafsForever pic.twitter.com/FVlhBkB9BH
— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) January 13, 2026
That’s eight goals and 14 points in the last eight games for the captain, who nabbed a secondary assist on Nylander’s OT winner.
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Matthews won almost 60 percent of his faceoffs against the Avs and registered two takeaways in yet another hint that the superstar of old has re-emerged. He might have had another goal early in the second period had a Colorado player not pulled it off the goal line. He got better and better as the game went along and ended up logging almost 26 minutes.
“He’s been cooking,” Nylander said of Matthews.
Nylander has also been cooking since he returned from injury, looking like the best version of himself following a quiet December. After a three-point outing in his return over the weekend, he set up Matthews’ 22nd goal of the year, then took Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s feed and deposited it past Trent Miner for the win.
The Leafs continue to find contributions from down the lineup, with Bobby McMann the star role player this time around.
McMann started the night on the fourth line for the second game in a row but quickly moved up in the wake of Nick Robertson’s early departure with an apparent leg injury. It was McMann’s presence around the net that helped Easton Cowan ping the puck off Brent Burns’ skate and into the net for the game’s first goal.
McMann, who has registered the third-fastest maximum speed of any NHL player this season, trailing only Connor McDavid and Logan Cooley, then pounced on a loose puck in the neutral zone and broke away to score the game-tying goal in the middle period.
He fired six shots in the game and ended regulation back alongside Matthews and Max Domi, taking the place of Matthew Knies.
“He’s got such great speed and he uses it extremely well,” Berube said of McMann, also raving about the job he did defensively.
The Leafs did surrender a power-play goal, a rarity these days, but their penalty kill also buckled down in the last minutes of regulation to kill off a Matthews tripping penalty.
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Joseph Woll had another solid night in goal, and the Leafs also kept the speedy Avs largely to the outside after a frantic opening five minutes of the first period. They allowed only four high-danger shot attempts at five-on-five over the final two periods. Since Dec. 23, when this surge began, the Leafs rank a solid 11th in the NHL in expected goals defensively at five-on-five.
Asked where he’d seen the most growth from his team in recent weeks, Berube pointed to the “overall team play.”
“Just playing the system,” he said. “Defensively, we’ve been a lot better, obviously and that’s a big part of the game. And we’re scoring goals too. But we’ve scored goals all year, but defensively, we’re just a lot tighter and a lot better.”
This was probably the most significant road win any team can score right now, especially one like the Leafs, who have struggled away from home. They beat a juggernaut that simply doesn’t lose on home ice.
Said Matthews, “I just thought everybody really dug in deep tonight and we were able to pull this out, which is huge.”
– Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, Hockey Reference, NHL EDGE
Jonas Siegel is a staff writer on the Maple Leafs for The Athletic. Jonas previously covered the Leafs for TSN and AM 640. He was also the national hockey writer for the Canadian Press. Follow Jonas on Twitter @jonassiegel
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