Maple Leafs Preseason Finale: Split-Squad Sweep of Ottawa Answers Three Questions

The Maple Leafs preseason finale ended with a sweep and a clean bill of health

The Maple Leafs preseason finale was a doubleheader, and Toronto won both halves of it. The main group rolled Ottawa 6-1 at Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday night while the depth squad took the other end of the home-and-home 4-2, closing the exhibition schedule with the only result that actually matters in late September: everybody who was supposed to play, played, and everybody who played walked out of the building.

That is the real headline. Exhibition scores are noise. But this was the last live look before the regular season opens against Montreal on Sept. 29, and Jim Hiller dressed what amounted to his opening-night lineup in Toronto — everything but the fourth line, by the pre-game accounting. When a coach shows you that group and it puts six on the board, the specific things that happen inside the game carry more weight than the final score.

Three questions went into Wednesday. All three came out with an answer.

Question one: is Auston Matthews' knee an issue?

No. Matthews scored on four shots and added two assists, a three-point night in his last tune-up before a season that will be judged largely on whether he can carry a top line for 84 games. His 2025-26 ended early with an MCL injury, and every minute of this camp has been read through that lens — how he pushes off, whether he shortens strides, whether he avoids contact along the wall.

He did none of those things Wednesday. He drove the middle, he shot from his spots, and he finished. We wrote last week about the skating data that suggested the knee was fine; the finale added the part the data could not show, which is a player willing to take the puck into traffic and absorb what comes back.

John Tavares matched him with three points of his own, including the go-ahead goal late in the first on a two-on-one feed from William Nylander. Tavares turns 36 this month and has spent two straight camps being written off. He keeps not going away.

The goal sequence that mattered most

Jake McCabe tied the game before Tavares put Toronto ahead to stay. Jack Roslovic added a power-play goal in the second, and Zack MacEwen — a former Senator — and Morgan Rielly stretched it to 5-1. Tim Stutzle had Ottawa's only marker.

A power-play goal from Roslovic is worth flagging on its own, because Toronto's man advantage has been the single most-discussed unit of this camp and the retrieval-and-faceoff rebuild under the new staff is either going to work or it is going to sink a season. One exhibition conversion proves nothing. It is still better than the alternative.

Question two: what does Gavin McKenna look like against NHL bodies?

The No. 1 overall pick picked up his first preseason point on the Tavares goal, tipping a puck along the glass to spring the sequence that Nylander finished off with a cross-crease pass. It was not a highlight. It was the kind of play that gets an 18-year-old kept.

McKenna has been skating at left wing with Tavares and Nylander since the opening days of camp, and the alignment has held through every lineup sheet since. That is not an experiment any more; that is a plan. Whether it survives October is a different question — Hiller has him on the second power-play unit, which is the coaching staff hedging in a sensible way.

The thing to watch in the finale was not the point. It was that he was not obviously hunted. Ottawa is a heavy team with a forecheck built to punish teenagers, and McKenna got out of the building without the kind of shift that makes a coaching staff reconsider.

Question three: who is in net, and behind them?

Anthony Stolarz stopped 19 of 21 in one half of the split squad. Artur Akhtyamov stopped 13 of 15 in the other. Sergei Bobrovsky, who took his half-game against Montreal earlier in the exhibition schedule, did not dress Wednesday.

That is a fairly loud signal about how the crease gets managed. Toronto committed three years and a reported $21 million to a 37-year-old goaltender on July 1, and the entire logic of that contract is preservation — a managed workload from October onward so there is something left in April. Stolarz taking the heavier preseason load, and Akhtyamov getting a real look with the main group rather than a Marlies split, fits that theory exactly.

Akhtyamov's promotion to the A group alongside Easton Cowan and Oliver Ekman-Larsson is the sleeper development of the week. Toronto's organizational goaltending depth has been the most pessimistically projected part of this roster, and the club needs at least one of its internal options to be a real NHL emergency answer rather than a name on a depth chart.

What the second game told us

The 4-2 win in Ottawa was played by depth forwards and Marlies regulars, and it is the kind of game that is easy to ignore and should not be. Every player in that lineup is competing for one of the last two or three spots on a 23-man roster that has to be submitted by 5 p.m. ET on Sept. 28.

For a player on a two-way deal, this was the last audition. For a player who needs waivers to be assigned to the American Hockey League, it was the last chance to change a decision that was probably already made. Toronto put Dakota Mermis and Cole McWard on the wire on Tuesday, and neither appeared in either Wednesday lineup — the club had made up its mind before the puck dropped.

The preseason record does not matter. The health record does.

Toronto closes the exhibition schedule having gotten Matthews through it, having gotten Morgan Rielly through it, having gotten Chris Tanev through it, and having gotten its 18-year-old first overall pick through it. The one meaningful casualty is Dakota Joshua, whose core muscle injury has him day-to-day and genuinely uncertain for the opener.

Weigh that against a year ago. The 2025-26 season ended with Toronto out of the playoffs and its best player on the shelf, and the case for improvement this year rests almost entirely on availability. The public models that have Toronto around 91 points and a playoff probability in the high 30s are effectively pricing in another injury-shortened season for Matthews. If that assumption is wrong, the number is wrong.

The honest caveat

Ottawa did not dress a serious lineup for the game in Toronto, and neither game was played at anything close to regular-season intensity. A 6-1 exhibition win over a split-squad opponent in the last week of September is a rounding error.

What is not a rounding error: a first-line centre who moves like his knee is healed, a top-six that produced from three different lines, a rookie who did not look overwhelmed, and a goaltending tandem that is being deliberately rationed. Those are structural, and they survive the exhibition asterisk.

What's next

The roster has to be cut to 23 and cap compliant by Sept. 28 at 5 p.m. ET. Because waivers take a full 24 hours to clear, any remaining player who needs them had to be on the wire by Sunday at the latest. Expect the final trims within the next 72 hours, and expect the club to be working the Max Domi long-term injured reserve mechanism to get under the $104 million ceiling.

Then Montreal, Sept. 29, 7 p.m. ET at Scotiabank Arena, for the seventh consecutive season opener between these two clubs. You can track the roster at our players page, the cap picture at contracts, and where Toronto sits once the games count at standings.