BOSTON—Another year, another playoff disappointment. It has become a rite of spring that cannot please the folks who control the Maple Leafs.
In an NHL post-season that is famous for being unpredictable, the failure of the Maple Leafs has become reliably perennial. In a Stanley Cup tournament that’s often a picture of chaos, for eight straight years now Toronto’s early playoff exit has become as accepted as another MLSE price increase.
If Saturday night’s first-round elimination at the hands of the Bruins was some rare setback, perhaps nobody would be too upset. Certainly nobody is suggesting the Leafs embarrassed themselves in a 2-1 overtime loss in a first-round Game 7 at TD Garden.
Good job, good effort. Much less good: The all-too familiar result.
It’s been 10 years since team president Brendan Shanahan began overseeing the Leafs, and in the course of that decade the slightest of post-season success has been a literal one-off. One charmed series victory over Tampa last year, promptly followed by a meek second-round bow-out to Florida, hardly validates Shanahan’s annual expressions of faith in a core that has never failed to let him down. Neither does Toronto’s heartening late-series rally from a 3-1 series deficit.
The Leafs are now 0-5 in Game 7s in the Shanaplan era. If you’re not good at Game 7, maybe the hockey gods are trying to tell you something. Such as: You’re not good at the playoffs. The numbers say the Leafs simply aren’t. pc28is 1-8 in post-season series since winning the draft lottery for Auston Matthews. They’ve compiled a dismal .421 playoff winning percentage in 57 playoff games since 2016-17.
What’s missing? Consider how Boston coach Jim Montgomery described his state of mind when he came to the rink on Saturday.
“You wonder if (your players) are going to go grab it,” Montgomery said. “Players win championships. They’ve got to go grab it.”
That was the difference Sunday. Boston’s best player, David Pastrnak, grabbed it, scoring the overtime winner amid a Leaf-ian lack of resistance. How did Pastrnak skate untouched past Mitch Marner and Morgan Rielly to cradle a back-boards bank pass from Hampus Lindholm and tuck it past a stunned Ilya Samsonov? The Leafs can go over the video in training camp.
John Tavares, left, and Morgan Rielly have spent years trying to explain the Leafs’ playoff losses, and there are still more questions than answers.
Michael Dwyer/The Associated PressFor all the Maple Leafs’ post-game talk about being proud of their effort in a series that came down to the slimmest margins, that’s the essence of the problem in Toronto. Big wins aren’t given. They’ve got to be taken. Again and again, the Leafs watch opportunity pass them by and fail to seize it.
Shanahan acknowledged as much a couple of years back: “We’re still seeking that killer instinct,” he said.
On Saturday night the unsuccessful search continued. For a moment, after William Nylander scored to make it 1-0 midway through the third period, the Leafs seemingly had the game in their grasp. To that point, they’d done a beautiful impersonation of a credible playoff team, buttoned-down and low event and physical. But them being them, this team being this team, they let it slip. pc28got suddenly scrambly. Lindholm equalized shortly thereafter. And history repeated.
If it repeats in the days to come, the Leafs will characterize Saturday’s loss as another learning experience. Alas, the organization’s proclamations of progress, of learning through losing, just haven’t borne fruit.
It’s not like there haven’t been measured critics pointing to this team’s fundamental flaws — a top-heavy, forward-centric salary-cap structure that has sacrificed goaltending and defence and four-line depth. The evidence couldn’t be clearer. pc28is the highest-scoring regular-season team in the league since Matthews came aboard. And yet, in the games that matter, the Leafs struggle to score. Certainly that was the case on Saturday, when Matthews returned from injury to play an underwhelming Game 7. pc28ended another short playoff run having scored two or fewer goals in 13 of its most recent 14 playoff games.
If this isn’t a moment for bigger-picture analysis of the franchise’s ridiculously stubborn insistence on standing by its Core Four forwards despite perennial disappointment, with new CEO Keith Pelley asking questions, there’ll never be one.
You can blame any number of bogeymen for this year’s flameout. The Leafs were out-goalied again, for sure. They were dealt setbacks in the form of the absence of Nylander in the opening three games and Matthews later on. And there will be those who make a strong case that the unacceptable series-long under-performance of Toronto’s 1-for-21 playoff power play ought to have the members of the coaching staff polishing their resumes. Blame the coaches, sure. But like Montgomery said: The players have to grab it.
Head coach Sheldon Keefe was asked the annual question: What gives him the belief this team can eventually win. Even he had to qualify it with some recognition of the near-comedic déjà vu.
“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, trying to break through for a long time. Any answer is going to fall on deaf ears in that sense. I get that,” Keefe said.
He tried to make the case, anyhow.
“This group was different this year … I thought we showed signs in this series of a team that can win.”
We all saw signs, coach. We also saw the final score. Where do the Leafs go from here? There are obvious holes everywhere. The blue line needs help. There’s uncertainty in goal, what with Samsonov an impending free agent and Joseph Woll, who missed Game 7 with an injury, coming off a health-challeged season. Marner, eligible to sign a contract extension this summer, is a potential trade piece, if he’d be interested in steering himself to a new situation. Still, that would require Shanahan admitting the vision he so stubbornly supported for so many years has been a failure.
Which brings us to a bigger question that overhangs it all: Who, precisely, ought to be making the decisions? And why, assuming playoff results are the ultimate bellwether of franchise health, would anyone believe in the status quo?
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