Five Takeaways: The big dogs eat; Kase and Bunting go to battle (+)

A 5-2 win against the Boston Bruins gives the Maple Leafs five straight wins. Naturally, there is a greater sense of optimism around the team than there was during a four-game winless streak earlier in the season. “It’s a lot better vibe in (the room) now,” said Maple Leafs right winger Mitch Marner. “We are a team that have a lot of trust in each other, a lot of faith in each other to win hockey games.”

“The biggest thing is that we have shown belief,” said head coach Sheldon Keefe. “Just stay with it.”

The improvement has been coming, though, according to the head coach.

“I take it back to Carolina. I talked about at the time, even though that game didn’t go the way we wanted to, I felt coming out of that game that experience there – because I did think we played well in that game, we just played a really good team that made it hard on us – I thought our team would grow through that experience. And it has been incremental. It took time in Chicago for things to turn and start to come. Since there, there has been incremental growth in our team and things have started to fall into place.”

“This was a big win here tonight,” Keefe continued. “Obviously, just as we need to block out the noise when things aren’t going well, it’s equally important we do it now.”

As for Saturday’s win, Keefe thought it was a team win.

“We had terrific efforts from each line, defence, goaltending, special teams,” said Keefe.

“It was just a great team effort all the way through,” said Keefe. “Yes, the guys that we need to score, that we count on to score, did, but there’s a lot of really good things happening all through the lineup.”

To the takeaways…