Utah’s power play gives Toronto a specific problem to solve Tuesday night: can the Maple Leafs keep the Mammoth from turning a fairly close matchup into a special-teams advantage? Utah showed how dangerous those chances can be in its latest win, while Toronto’s stars delivered a big scoring night of their own. That makes discipline—and what each team does with its power-play chances—a useful place to start when weighing Utah’s favorite status and the 6.5-goal total.
Utah’s power play meets a successful Toronto penalty kill
Utah beat Buffalo 4-1 on Saturday, with Nick Schmaltz and John Marino scoring on the power play. Through that game, the Mammoth had converted 10 of 25 chances with the extra skater. Schmaltz already had six goals in six games, including four on the power play. That’s a sharp early-season run, even with only six games behind it.
Toronto has a recent answer to that threat. The Maple Leafs killed all five Colorado power plays in Saturday’s 6-3 win and scored twice on their own power play. William Nylander finished with two goals and three assists, while Auston Matthews added two goals and two assists. Toronto’s path here isn’t just limiting Utah’s chances; its leading scorers just showed they can make the Mammoth pay at the other end.
Our power-play opportunity projections call for roughly three chances apiece. Utah has a promising scoring route, but the expected opportunity count doesn’t suggest an endless stream of chances. Making those few advantages count could be a bigger swing factor than the small difference in projected shooting volume.
What the favorite’s price and total ask of these teams
DraftKings’ moneyline odds put Utah at -155 and Toronto at +130. The Mammoth have won four of their first six games, and backing them outright at the historical prices in those six games returned a profit of 1.25 units on flat one-unit bets. That’s a positive start for both the team and its backers; the -155 price still deserves its own assessment, especially against a Toronto attack coming off that six-goal performance.
The 6.5-goal total puts the special-teams matchup in focus. Our projections have Utah taking about 28 shots and Toronto about 26—a modest shooting-volume difference, rather than a picture of one team overwhelming the other. Utah’s recent power-play production offers a way for scoring to climb without unusually heavy shot totals. Toronto’s successful penalty killing against Colorado is the clearest recent counterweight.
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There’s also reason not to chase Toronto’s latest high-scoring results blindly. Its last three games went over their posted totals, but across each team’s six most recent games this season, both Toronto and Utah split evenly between three overs and three unders.
If Sergei Bobrovsky and Karel Vejmelka get the starts, their recent save percentages offer little separation: both round to .907, across four Toronto appearances for Bobrovsky and five Utah appearances for Vejmelka. Those small samples don’t identify either goalie as an obvious weak link when assessing the 6.5 total.
The matchup takeaway
Utah’s early power-play production gives it a concrete strength to lean on as the favorite. Toronto’s countercase is clear, too: its stars just produced a major scoring night while its penalty kill shut out Colorado. With only a modest gap in projected shots, Utah’s ability to keep converting against that resistance is a key swing factor. At 6.5, the power plays provide a credible route to more scoring, but the recent penalty-killing result and both teams’ balanced over/under records make it worth resisting a simple extrapolation from their latest wins.
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