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Leafs Notebook: What’s driving the defensive regression so far in 2023-24?

At the time, Woll’s strong play coincided with several injuries on defense, so it was somewhat easy to shrug off some of the defensive issues and dismiss them until the blue line got healthy and properly sorted.

Then Woll got injured, Ilya Samsonov continued to struggle (as he has all season), and now it’s Martin Jones’ net for the time being. It’s not exactly how the Leafs brass drew it up, but so far, the team is managing reasonably well. As a team, Toronto is 18th in 5v5 save percentage, which is by no means terrible, all things considered.