As Sunday’s Game 7 looms after the Maple Leafs flew home Saturday to rest and prepare, a fan would have been excused for believing there’s something unusual in the air.
No, not the smell of stinking rich owners cackling at the windfall of another home playoff gate at Scotiabank Arena. That’s the in-house fragrance nobody even notices anymore. We’re referring to one of the best sports stories of the spring, when unexpected celebrations have broken out among the long-suffering supporters of a legacy franchise based in a financial centre that considers itself a sporting capital.
That description fits the New York Knicks, the NBA team stationed in the moneyed mecca of basketball, which spent Friday night advancing to the Eastern Conference final for the first time since 2000.
But it could also fit a certain NHL team from the centre of the hockey universe. If the Leafs beat the Florida Panthers in Game 7, they’ll earn their first trip to the Eastern final since 2002.
The symmetries between the Knicks and Leafs have always been there. The championship droughts that stretch back to 1973 and 1967, respectively. The shameless ownership that never fails to charge eye-watering prices whether the team wins or loses. The alumni who never won titles in the 1990s and 2000s worshipped as gods by fan bases who’ve lowered their standard for excellence out of necessity.
And this spring there are more common threads. Suddenly the fanatical optimism that always emanates from the expensive seats on Broadway and Bay Street seems at least a little more credible than usual. In the Big Apple, a forever frustrated Madison Square Garden crowd is wide-eyed with possibilities after the Knicks eliminated the defending champion Boston Celtics to earn their spot in the NBA’s final four.
In the Big Smoke, a frequently frazzled fan base can keep the dream alive of ending the longest championship drought in NHL history with one more win against the reigning champions from Florida.
On it goes. The NBA’s East final sees the Knicks matched up against the Indiana Pacers, the same franchise they played the last time they made it this far a quarter-century ago. The Leafs, should they prevail on Sunday, would play the Carolina Hurricanes, the same franchise they met in the East final in their most recent trip.
Not that it’s going to be easy. The Panthers, though they’re the lower seed and playing on the road, are the betting favourites, perhaps in large part because the Leafs are 0-5 in Game 7s in the Shanaplan era. Mind you, the Leafs were casting Friday’s 2-0 win in Florida as a Game 7 equivalent. It was not a winner-take-all contest, to be sure. But it was a do-or-die performance in which they displayed a compelling combination of determination and patience that was capped by the big-moment opportunism of Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews combining on Matthews’s winning goal.
Whether Friday’s win represented the height of this team’s capabilities or a harbinger of more clutch work to come, coach Craig Berube has staked out the only logical position for a first-year coach. Rather than frantically tinkering with the minutiae of line combinations and bottom-of-the lineup roster tweaks, he has largely put his faith in the approach and deployment that’s allowed his franchise to arrive at this point — as far as it’s been in the playoffs in a couple of decades, with a chance to go farther.
“I don’t think a whole lot needs to change,” Berube said, speaking of the Game 7 game plan. “You’ve got to be determined, you’ve got to be desperate and you’ve got to have urgency. We’ve just got to work. Gotta (put) work before skill, and then the skill can take over at some point.”
For all that, there’s no getting around the fact the Panthers’ most recent experience in a Game 7 ended with them hoisting the Stanley Cup against the Edmonton Oilers last spring.
“Personally, I enjoy them,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice told reporters Saturday, speaking of Game 7s. Which is easy enough to say when you’re a personal 5-0 in them. (Berube, who also won a Cup-clinching Game 7 in 2019 with the St. Louis Blues, is 2-1).
“I’m not sure how much experience the coach has in Game 7 matters all that much,” Maurice said. “There’s probably some guys in your lineup that don’t have any Game 7 experience, and they may be great at it because they don’t have any. Who knows? Like, I don’t know what the value of all your experience is.
“If you have 20 years’ experience but it’s the same experience every year for 20 years, you only have one year of experience.”
Knicks and Leafs fans of a certain age can nod at the profound truth contained in that statement. But after becoming so well acquainted with the “Groundhog Day” reoccurrence of decades of perennial disappointment in Gotham and Hogtown, here’s a moment in time that could stand apart. How long the moment lasts in pc28hinges on Sunday’s massive 60 minutes.
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