Leafs vs Canadiens Opening Night: Toronto Faces a 28-Point Gap

Leafs vs Canadiens opening night is a measuring stick, not a party

The Leafs vs Canadiens opening night matchup on Tuesday, Sept. 29 will be sold as a celebration — the oldest rivalry in the sport, a new Maple Leafs roster, Gavin McKenna's likely NHL debut, a 7 p.m. ET national broadcast from Scotiabank Arena. It is all of that. It is also the single clearest measurement Toronto will get of how far behind it actually is.

Montreal finished 48-24-10 for 106 points last season and reached the Eastern Conference Final. Toronto finished 32-36-14 for 78 points and last in the Atlantic Division. That is a 28-point gap between two teams that will line up against each other in the first game of the season, and nothing that happened this summer closed it on paper.

What Montreal actually did last season

The Canadiens were not a fluke. They scored 283 goals and allowed 256, finished third in the Atlantic behind Buffalo and Florida, then went on a genuine run: seven games to beat Tampa Bay in the first round, seven more to beat Buffalo in the second, and out in five to Carolina in the conference final.

Nick Suzuki put up 101 points. Cole Caufield scored 51 goals. Lane Hutson continued to be one of the most watchable young defencemen in the league. Ivan Demidov and Juraj Slafkovsky both took steps. This is a team that finished its rebuild ahead of schedule and then proved it in April and May.

For Toronto fans who have spent a decade being told Montreal was years away, the adjustment is uncomfortable. The Canadiens got young, got good, and got there without a single 100-point regular season from a superstar centre being treated as a failure every spring.

The Dobson move that accelerated everything

The clearest single decision was acquiring Noah Dobson from the Islanders at the 2025 draft, reportedly at the cost of two first-round picks and Emil Heineman. Dobson dealt with injuries in his first Montreal season but produced at an elite level at five-on-five when available. Paired with Hutson and Kaiden Guhle, Montreal now has a blue line that is both young and genuinely good — the exact thing Toronto has been trying to build since 2018.

Montreal's quiet summer was a choice, not a failure

The Canadiens did almost nothing in free agency. Their notable additions were Brett Berard and Sasha Pastujov, neither of whom was a full-time NHLer last season. Michael Hage, their top prospect, is expected back in college for another year rather than jumping to the NHL.

That is a team confident in what it has. Suzuki, Caufield, Slafkovsky, Demidov, Hutson, Dobson, Guhle, Jakub Dobes and Alex Newhook are all signed through at least 2029-30. Montreal's front office spent its summer doing nothing because its core is already locked in at prices set before those players' best seasons.

Compare that to Toronto's summer. John Chayka moved out Joseph Woll, Simon Benoit, Brandon Carlo, Nick Robertson and Dennis Hildeby, and brought in Sergei Bobrovsky, Darren Raddysh, Colton Sissons, Emil Andrae, Jack Roslovic, Nick Paul, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime and Zack MacEwen. Enormous churn, mostly around the edges, on a roster whose expensive core could not be moved.

Where Toronto can actually win this game

None of the above means Toronto loses on Sept. 29. Single games are noisy, home ice is real, and opening night rewards the team that shows up in better condition — which, in a September start, is not a trivial variable.

Three specific edges are available to the Leafs. The first is goaltending experience: Bobrovsky has two Stanley Cups and three Cup Final appearances, and whatever the concerns about a 37-year-old carrying a starter's load, he is not going to be rattled by an opening-night crowd. Anthony Stolarz gives Toronto a real second option, and we laid out how that tandem should be split earlier this month.

The second is special teams. Raddysh arrived from Tampa Bay via a June 19 sign-and-trade specifically to fix a power play that has lacked a right-shot shooter at the top of the umbrella — 115 slap shots last season, the most by any NHL defenceman since Brent Burns in 2018-19. One power-play goal decides plenty of opening nights.

The third is novelty. Montreal has never seen this Toronto team play. A new coaching staff under Jim Hiller, a new defensive structure, a reworked bottom six and a rookie first-overall pick in the lineup add up to a genuine information advantage in game one. It evaporates by November.

The 28-point gap in context

Here is the sober framing. Toronto does not have to be better than Montreal to make the playoffs. It has to be better than two of Montreal, Florida, Tampa Bay, Detroit and Ottawa, in a division Buffalo won at 50-23-9 for 109 points. The Atlantic is the hardest division in hockey and the road back got harder this summer, not easier.

A 28-point improvement in one season is rare but not unheard of. It usually requires three things at once: a large goaltending upgrade, better health from a star, and a defensive system change that holds. Toronto has plausibly bought all three — Bobrovsky in net, Auston Matthews returning from March knee surgery, and Hiller hired specifically to fix a team that allowed 299 goals.

Plausibly is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The market is unconvinced: Toronto sits around 19th in Stanley Cup odds, and public projections mostly have the Leafs on the playoff bubble rather than through it. Our position has been that the range of outcomes here is unusually wide — this roster could win 45 games or 32, and the honest answer in August is that nobody knows which.

Why the opener matters more than one game should

Normally the first game of a season is worth exactly two points. This one is worth more than that to Toronto for a structural reason: the schedule is front-loaded. The Leafs play 16 games before Halloween, roughly 19 per cent of the 84-game season, and they open with four straight at home before a road stretch through Vegas, Colorado, Utah and all of Western Canada.

That means the opening homestand is the softest part of Toronto's autumn, and Montreal is the hardest opponent on it. Drop that game and the margin for error on the rest of the homestand shrinks immediately. We laid out why a fast start is structurally non-negotiable this season — this is the first test of it.

The one thing that would change the reading

If Auston Matthews looks like himself in October, everything above gets re-argued. He is 428 goals into a career that produced 27 in 60 games last season, and the difference between a 30-goal Matthews and a 45-goal Matthews is roughly the difference between a bubble team and a playoff team in this division. Montreal does not have a player whose variance swings a season that hard. Toronto does, and that is the one structural advantage the Leafs hold over a club that finished 28 points ahead of them.

What's next

The two clubs will have seen each other twice before it counts. Toronto's preseason opens Sept. 19 with split-squad games against Montreal, one at Bell Centre and one at Scotiabank Arena on the same night. Their prospects meet earlier still, at the NHL Prospect Challenge in Gatineau on Sept. 12-13.

Between now and Sept. 29, the open questions are the same ones that have been open all summer: whether Max Domi is available, whether Morgan Rielly is still here, and which two forwards win the open top-six spots. Follow the division race on standings once the puck drops.