Leafs’ season – and future – on brink of oblivion after Game 5 humiliation
It really summed up the 60-minute nightmare perfectly. With his team trailing 2-0 and attempting to break out of its zone midway through the second period, Mitch Marner decided it was the perfect time to try…a no-look, spin-o-rama pass up the middle of the ice. It was a play so befuddling it simply had to result directly in goal the other way. That was pretty much ordained.
Marner’s pass went right onto the stick of Gustav Forsling, who sprung Sam Reinhart, who entered the zone and fed Jesper Boqvist, who tapped the puck past goaltender Joseph Woll. That put the Florida Panthers up 3-0 on the Toronto Maple Leafs in Game 5 and killed any lingering hope that Toronto would find its backbone and mount a comeback. Florida cruised to a 6-1 victory, the familiar Scotiabank Arena boo birds rising up before the second period was even complete. The five-goal margin of defeat was Toronto’s worst in a playoff game since 2004, when it fell 7-2 to the Philadelphia Flyers.
“First period, they outskated us, they had the puck, won the races, we just played slow,” said Leafs coach Craig Berube. “They were fast, they were on us, they’re were hungrier…It’s hard to explain it. We’ve all got to be better, myself included. You can’t start the game like that. It’s a big thing for me. It sets the tone for the game. I don’t have an answer for why. It’s sports, things happen.”
The Leafs looked flat, beat up and potentially out of gas during their 2-0 Game 4 defeat Sunday, but a trip home, where the Leafs held a 4-1 record this postseason, was a potential antidote. It didn’t take long for that notion to evaporate. The Panthers were quicker on most puck battles in the first period, outclassing the Leafs, outshooting them 14-6. Aaron Ekblad’s opening goal came after the Panthers hemmed in the Leafs’ top line of Matthew Knies, Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner and threw so many pucks Woll’s way that a goal felt inevitable.
The Leafs showed a bit more jump to open the second period, but the hockey gods stomped on them. The utterly snakebitten Scott Laughton, who entered Game 5 with two goals in a Toronto uniform across 30 games dating back to the regular season, almost tied the contest 1-1 when he hit the crossbar early in the second. He finally put a puck into a hockey net – his own – when he deflected a Dmitry Kulikov shot past Woll for the second Panthers goal. The Leafs began melting down after that.
It was such a perplexingly tepid effort top to bottom that it was tough to pin it on one particular Leaf player Wednesday night. Woll didn’t have a ton of help but also wasn’t sharp. The Panthers’ fourth goal, a clean slapper from Niko Mikkola, Woll saw all the way. After he surrendered the fifth early in the third, Berube mercy-pulled Woll for Matt Murray. Florida got three goals from defensemen and couple from checkers Boqvist (playing on the first line) and A.J. Greer in Game 5. The Panthers didn’t even need their elite forwards to carry them.
On the flipside: Toronto’s elite forwards were ghosts in Game 5, seemingly planning their attack around flipping pucks up the middle of the ice praying for breakaways. The Knies-Matthews-Marner line had a pitiful 39.43 percent expected goal share at 5-on-5, outchanced 11-3.
“I don’t think the lines have anything to do with it,” Berube said. “They’re going against the [Aleksander] Barkov line for the most part, and if you look at the matchup throughout the series, it’s pretty tight. There’s not going to be a lot of room out there. They’ve done a good job up until tonight against that line. That’s part of their job. I get it, our top guys have to produce. But they’ve done a lot of good things up to this point. Tonight wasn’t a good game for anybody. Anybody. All of us. It was not a good game.”
The collective meltdown culminated in an exasperated fan hurling a Matthews jersey onto the ice midway through the third period as the fans bolted for the exits early.
“I don’t think we gave them much reason to stick around,” Matthews said.
So here the Leafs are in that familiar, piping-hot seat, trailing 3-2 in their second-round series, heading back to the defending Stanley Cup champions’ den Friday night. Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky made some excellent saves when the game was still anyone’s to win, including a breakaway stop on William Nylander at 0-0 and a pad save on a Knies power-play chance with the score 1-0. ‘Bob’ has gained more confidence with each passing game, posting a shutout streak of 147:58 between the third period of Game 3 and Nick Robertson’s only-for-pride goal late in Game 5. Despite the embarrassing score, Toronto, a team not facing elimination, showed little pushback or interest in making the Panthers physically uncomfortable and giving them something to think about going forward. The Leafs truly earned the boos in Game 5.
“You go home, you realize that wasn’t close to good enough, you flush it down the toilet,” Marner said. “Everyone has their own way of coping with things and forgetting about things. Whatever yours is, just go home, do it. Relax, do what you need to do to your body to recover.”
In defeating the Ottawa Senators in six Games in Round 1 and flying out to a 2-0 series lead on Florida, it felt like the Leafs of the Matthews/Marner era were finally breaking new ground, empowered by no-nonsense Berube. But if the Leafs end up limply dropping four consecutive games to close out this series…how much progress will be erased?
It feels like a Leafs team that reaches the Eastern Conference Final deserves to run it back. Two playoff series victories would constitute legitimate progress and put Toronto in the final four for the first time in 23 years. The Leafs could justify re-signing pending UFAs Marner and John Tavares and keeping longest-tenured player Morgan Rielly around in that scenario. But if the Leafs lay another stinker on the kitchen floor and guiltily crawl out the doggie door on Friday… will it leave GM Brad Treliving no choice but to take a wrecking ball to the core?
The group doesn’t have to answer that achingly familiar question just yet. The Leafs can still theoretically recapture that alpha-dog swagger that made them look like a team with a newfound identity earlier in these playoffs. But they’ve looked as weak and defenseless as newborn kittens the past couple games, and it doesn’t inspire much confidence that they’re about to surprise us.
It’s up to them to change the narrative.
“Everybody’s got to look in the mirror, myself included,” Matthews said. “Everybody wants to be better, everybody wants to win. And we’ve been a great road team all season long. There’s always going to be belief in this group and the confidence in this group, from what we built off throughout the year. So we’ve got to go into this game with confidence, and it’s got to be our best game of the year.”
_____
POST SPONSORED BY bet365
_____