As Devils’ season peters out, Leafs surging toward playoffs

As the New Jersey Devils playoff hopes came to an official end at the Prudential Center on Tuesday night, the team that put the final nail in the coffin was headed in a decidedly different direction.

The Toronto Maple Leafs used four unanswered goals to score a 5-2 win and remain within three points of the Florida Panthers for the second seed in the Atlantic Division, a battle that will essentially determine who has home-ice advantage in their likely playoff series, barring a late collapse by the current leaders, the Boston Bruins.

It’s no secret that recent postseasons have not been kind to the Leafs; seven playoff appearances in the past seven years have yielded just one trip out of the first round, and that was last season when the Panthers dismissed them in five games after they’d scored something of an upset over the Tampa Bay Lightning.

So, yes, the Leafs still have plenty to play for over the last four games of the regular season, but momentum heading into the playoffs, however that looks, is certainly important.

“It’s very important,” said superstar forward Auston Matthews. “We want to be peaking and playing our best hockey this time of year, so I think there’s been a lot of good things that we’ve done and things that we’ve cleaned up. We just want to continue to keep the ball rolling in the right direction, and make sure that the details are extremely dialed in.”

And on nights where maybe they aren’t? Well, they have Matthews, who scored his 66th goal of the season on Tuesday night, breaking the “salary-cap era” record set by Alex Ovechkin back in 2007-08 when he lit the lamp 65 times.

In any era, only 20 players have ever scored more than Matthews’ 66 in a season, and he’s the first to reach that plateau since Mario Lemieux did during the 1995-96 campaign. Hitting 70 is on the radar for the 26-year-old first overall pick from the 2015 NHL Draft, a feat only ever accomplished 14 times in league history, with four of those being accomplished by Wayne Gretzky.

Matthews will get his first shot at it when the Devils play in Toronto on Thursday to finish the home-and-home twogame slate.

“The process is the same every night,” he said. “I find when you maybe overthink it and maybe want it too much, it doesn’t go your way. So, I just try to approach every game the same. We’re winding down here to the last couple games, and I just want to make sure — myself individually and as a team — we’re doing the right things on both sides of the puck that will translate in the postseason.”