Marner pushes point streak to 21, Maple Leafs blank Kings

TORONTO --Mitchell Marner scored to extend his point streak to 21 games for the Toronto Maple Leafs in a 5-0 win against the Los Angeles Kings at Scotiabank Arena on Thursday.

Marner has 28 points (10 goals, 18 assists) during his streak.
"I think it's up there, for sure, especially against a team that does a great job really stopping people through the neutral zone, stopping speed, breaking out cleanly," Marner said. "I thought in that second period we really took over the game, played our game, played with speed, pace, got the puck in, and I thought we did a good job of hemming them in and doing good line changes."
Ilya Samsonov made 29 saves for his first shutout with the Maple Leafs (17-5-6), who extended their point streak to 13 games (10-0-3). William Nylander had a goal and an assist.
"Unbelievable job for our whole team," Samsonov said. "[Defensive] zone, offensive zone, we dominated today. It was a great job."

The Maple Leafs' shutout streak stands at 120:00 after Matt Murray made 44 saves in a 4-0 win at the Dallas Stars on Tuesday.
Jonathan Quick made 36 saves for the Kings (14-11-4), who are 3-2-2 in their past seven games.
"If the mental part is not there, there is no way the physical part is going to be there," Los Angeles coach Todd McLellan said. "I thought we were light and slow in the first period, we didn't win any races, and then when we did even come close to winning any of them, we were real light with our sticks, real light with body position and it just kept going all night.
"I'm actually quite disappointed because we haven't used words like 'light' and 'slow' in a long, long time with our team. We've had some bad nights where we've made mistakes, but that was uncharacteristic of us and a little bit concerning."
The Maple Leafs scored three goals in 1:06 in the second period to take a 3-0 lead. It was the sixth time in the past 20 years they have scored three goals in that amount of time or less.
"I think it was a really, really good game," Toronto center Auston Matthews said. "We obviously did a lot of really good things well, and two straight games not allowing a goal, a lot of credit goes to the way we've been defending and obviously the goaltending we've been getting from both Samsonov and Murray. I think just a full team effort all around. Those are the types of games you want to play and be consistently playing that way."
Pierre Engvall made it 1-0 at 5:10 when he shot past Quick's glove from the left face-off dot on the power play.
David Kampf scored 26 seconds later at 5:36 to make it 2-0 when he shot from the left hash marks. It was his first goal in 20 games.
Nylander made it 3-0 at 6:16 when he chipped the puck past defenseman Sean Walker at the Kings blue line for a breakaway and deked Quick with a backhand shot past his outstretched right pad.
"We didn't play nearly as good as we needed to, obviously," Kings captain Anze Kopitar said. "Even in the first period it was 0-0, but in large part thanks to Quick. Quite frankly, all of the credit goes to him. We just weren't good enough."

Marner extended the lead to 4-0 at 13:29 when he put a slap shot over Quick's blocker from the top of the right face-off circle.
"I saw it come back in and sitting there," Marner said. "I don't really do those much but decided to try and lean into it and see what happened, and I got all of it this time around."
The Maple Leafs killed off a five-minute major penalty for intent to injure Engvall at 1:07 of the third period. The Kings thought they had scored at 4:43, but the goal was overturned after the Maple Leafs successfully challenged that the play was offside.
Matthews scored to extend his point streak to six games at 9:37 of the third period when he one-timed a pass in the slot from Nylander to make it 5-0. He has 10 points (five goals, five assists) during the streak.
"To be honest, I was a little uncertain about how we were going to come out here tonight," Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said. "I just felt coming back from Dallas, it's a longer road trip even though we only played two games. We just traveled back yesterday, not much of a recovery day for us, and then right into a game day today, but obviously the guys responded really well."
NOTES:Maple Leafs forward Nicholas Robertson sustained a shoulder injury when he took a hit from Matt Roy at 9:18 of the first period. Keefe said he will miss "significant time." … Toronto's point streak record is 16 (14-0-2), from Nov. 22-Dec. 26, 2003. … Marner is the 10th player in 35 years to have a point streak of at least 21 games, and third active (Patrick Kane, 26, 2015-16; Sidney Crosby, 25, 2010-11). … Nylander has five goals in his past seven games. … Maple Leafs defenseman TJ Brodie had an assist, two shots and four blocked shots in 17:27 after missing 12 games with an oblique injury. … Toronto forward Denis Malgin had three shots in 12:56 after being a healthy scratch the previous three games. … Maple Leafs forward Michael Bunting had two assists to extend his assist streak to seven games (nine assists). … Kings defenseman Sean Durzi had his six-game assist streak end (eight assists). … Los Angeles forward Phillip Danault played his 500th NHL game. … The Kings went 0-for-3 on the power play after scoring at least one power-play goal in each of the previous seven games (11-for-20, 55.0 percent).