Misery loves company.
So, if you’re a Maple Leafs fan, know that the Maple Leafs need your company now.
It’s over. The Montreal Canadiens saw to that with a 3-1 win in a heartbreaking Game 7 at Scotiabank Arena on Monday.
They’ll play the Winnipeg Jets, starting Wednesday, in the North Division final.
The best Leafs team assembled in the Brendan Shanahan era, with gritty free agents and a rounded-out defence to add to their stellar core, lost in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Again. Like a B-movie where you can see the ending coming from the opening scene but you hope for something different, the Leafs went down in spectacular style.
“We’re obviously devastated, disappointed. We expected better of ourselves,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said.
Their misery showed in a parade of long faces to the video conference calls with the media afterward.
Take Rocket Richard winner Auston Matthews, who had 41 regular-season goals, and one in the playoffs.
“I’m not really sure how to sum it up, it’s obviously extremely frustrating,” Matthews said. “I mean there’s not really much to be said.”
Mitch Marner, an exquisite playmaker who was second on the team in goals during the season, had none in seven playoff games.
“Come playoff time you want to be the guy they go to, and the guy that can lead the team out of a series,” Marner said. “We had multiple looks every single game, (the puck) just wasn’t going in.”
Goaltender Jack Campbell, the record-setter with 11 wins to start a season, knocked himself for the game’s opening goal from Brendan Gallagher.
“I think how hard our team battled, then for it to end (on Gallagher’s) goal, the worst goal of my career, and happen in Game 7, it’s not acceptable,” said Campbell. “The team counts on me to be better and I know I can be a lot better than that.”
The game didn’t end on that goal, but it may as well have. pc28didn’t have a lead at any point over the final three games. Corey Perry scored on the power play with 4:35 to go in the second period. Tyler Toffoli scored an empty netter. William Nylander scored his fifth of the playoffs in the final two minutes, with the game out of reach.
The Leafs, who had third-period rallies in both Games 5 and 6 only to lose in overtime both times, had no answers. They were let down — almost predictably —by their power play, which had two chances in the final 20 minutes of the season. It had gone cold well before the playoffs started, and never warmed up.
“The expectation within the room was higher,” said defenceman Morgan Rielly. “The goals are far higher than what we achieved this year, and it makes the disappointment much worse. We feel it. And we realize that we let an opportunity slip.”
Opportunity lost
The Leafs had a 3-1 series lead over the Montreal Canadiens, three chances to advance to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2004.
As collapses go, this one is right up there with being up 4-1 late in the third period against Boston, losing 5-4 in overtime, in 2013. And, while it wasn’t the playoffs, who can forget that they were in third place in the Eastern Conference with 14 games to go, and went 2-12-0 down the stretch to land in the draft lottery.
Rielly said there was no connection between the failures of the past and this one.
“I totally understand how you would connect those but honestly I don’t think (history was) really a factor,” he said. “This is a different group. It’s been a very different year. Different playoff format. So I really don’t think that there was anything that happened in the past that played into what happened during this year’s playoff series.”
Yes, just another year ending in misery for the Maple Leafs and their long-suffering fans. They’re going on 55 years and counting since they last won the Stanley Cup.
Fans in the stands
That 550 fans — fully vaccinated health-care workers invited by the team — that were in the stands didn’t make that much of a difference. Though they chanted and waved towels, their presence ended up aided those who would make the Leafs the butt of jokes, like they were there to keep the team from choking.
Still, it was a moment that might be better remembered than the game itself, a moment forward in the bigger battle against the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s just another sign of progress here for the country and our province and our city,” Keefe said before the game. “What a terrific way to recognize health-care workers, front-line workers, who have given so much through this difficult time we’ve all been going through.”
Money goalie
In some ways, it was a battle of players earning eight figures. And Montreal’s $10.5-million (U.S.) goalie, Carey Price, was better than the Leafs’ Auston Matthews ($11.6 million) and Mitch Marner ($10.9 million). With John Tavares ($11 million) erased from the equation in Game 1, Montreal’s depth players outplayed Toronto’s.
The Canadiens certainly played a looser, almost confident brand of hockey from the moment their backs were against the wall. Underdogs, playing with nothing to lose, rallied to win. The Leafs seemed nervous for most of the final three games. They were good in spurts. But they were mistake-prone and elements of their game that led to such a successful regular season — like forechecking and breaking up plays — were absent in the latter part of this series.
No excuses
The Leafs were without Tavares from the second period of Game 1, missed defenceman Jake Muzzin in Game 7, and lost Nick Foligno mid-series, though he returned for the two final games, playing injured.
“He gave us everything that he had in the games that he did play, even though he was far from himself, far from 100 per cent,” Keefe said. “But despite not having John and despite not having Nick, we were in a really good spot and didn’t close it out.”
Asking questions
Plenty abound. What will happen to some of the older unrestricted free agents, like Joe Thornton, Wayne Simmonds and Jason Spezza? Will UFAs like Zach Hyman, Frederik Andersen and Alex Galchenyuk return, given the team’s salary cap restrictions? And who will be lost to the Seattle Kraken in the expansion draft? Maybe Travis Dermott or Alex Kerfoot.
Those who remain will bear the scars of another playoff disappointment, another summer of a fan base moaning and groaning about how much players are paid compared to how little they produce in the post-season. Those will be Matthews’ and Marner’s crosses to bear. William Nylander, generally the team’s most dangerous forward against Montreal, may escape that wrath.
Adding misery
It was supposed to be a series for the ages, but it simply added to Leafs misery. They hadn’t played their historic rival in the playoffs since 1979, and hadn’t beaten them since 1967. In a piece of trivia that bodes well for Canadiens fans, the winner of a Montreal-pc28playoff series — Montreal is 9-7 — has won the Stanley Cup every time, though that series was often the Stanley Cup final in the Original Six era.
But the Leafs did nothing to exorcise their demons, simply adding one. The franchise has not won a playoff round since 2004, in the days of Pat Quinn and Mats Sundin. They’re on a remarkably bad 0-8 run in games in which they could have eliminated an opponent.
The Phil Kessel-era Leafs set a new bar for disappointment in 2013, blowing a 4-1 lead with less than five minutes to go in Game 7 in Boston, losing in overtime.
The Matthews-led Leafs have failed to deliver despite showing so much more promise since reaching the playoffs in 2017, bowing out in six games to the Washington Capitals. They lost in the first round to Boston in 2018 in seven games, and again 2019 in seven games despite leading the series 3-2. And they fell to Columbus in the fifth-game of the pandemic induced best-of-five qualifying round last summer.
The text below was from the pre-game portion of Kevin McGran’s Leafs vs. Habs live blog for Game 7.
So here’s a look behind the curtain of how newsrooms operate. Once something becomes “Big News” other departments like to chime in on coverage.
Well, Game 7 was “Big News.” And someone from another department asked if I could sum up 54 years of Maple Leafs misery in, say, 250 words.
I laughed. Two-hundred and fifty thousand maybe. Books have been written on the subject.
But I like a challenge. So I here I go:
They were the first Stanley Cup champion to miss the playoffs the following year in the expansion era. And they did it the first year of the expansion era.
Harold Ballard. That’s two decades of wreckage. Dave Keon, Paul Henderson in the WHA. Bernie Parent traded.
Pyramid Power vs. the Broad St. Bullies.
Roger Neilson fired, then rehired the next day.
Punch Imlach. Darryl Sittler rips the “C” from his jersey. Lanny McDonald traded. Sittler traded.
The (Chuck) Norris Division.
Mike Nykoluk, Dan Maloney, John Brophy. Russ Courtnall for John Kordic. A first-round pick (Scott Niedermayer) for Tom Kurvers.
The Carlton Street Cashbox. The Honest Grocer. The Evil Empire. The teachers’ pension. Kerry Fraser didn’t see a high stick. Wayne Gretzky’s Greatest Game.
Larry Murphy. Draft schmaft.
Pat Quinn’s heart. The Carolina Hurricanes?
Jeremy Roenick.
I cannot confirm or deny. Tuukka Rask for Andrew Raycroft. Justin Pogge.
The Muskoka Five. No-trade clauses.
The salary cap.
Jeff Finger four years, $14 million.
Carlo Colaiacovo and Alex Steen for Lee Stempniak.
Pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence. Phil Kessel. Dion Phaneuf. Ron Wilson. Randy Carlyle. An 18-wheeler goes off a cliff. Hot dogs.
It was 4-1 late in the third.
David Clarkson, seven years, $36.75 million.
They went 2-12 down the stretch.
He was “Ok, Just okay.”
Bloody Sunday.
Peter Horacek’s “Give-A-S—t” meter.
Robidas Island.
Patrice Bergeron, David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand’s tongue.
Nazem Kadri got suspended. Again.
Jake Gardiner was minus-5.
Who is Elvis Merzlikins?
Mike Babcock.
The Leafs had a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series.
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