Boston, be careful what you wish for
Bruins get first-round opponents they want in the Leafs. Their next foe might be overconfidence
Blame Matt Frattin.
Well, remember who Matt Frattin was first, then blame him.
Frattin was a 25-year-old right winger from Edmonton who played 25 regular-season games for the Maple Leafs in 2012-13. He could shoot the puck and maybe had a future as an NHL goal-scorer.
His moment came in Game 7 of the first round of the 2013 Stanley Cup playoffs. The Leafs led Boston 4-2 with less than four minutes to play. Frattin blocked the shot of Boston defenceman Dougie Hamilton and raced down the ice on a clear breakaway. Score, and the fat lady would start to warble.
Frattin faked a move to his forehand, opted instead to try a shot off his weaker backhand side, and flubbed the puck wide of Tuukka Rask in the Bruins net.
“That would have pretty much finished off the Bruins,” said “Hockey Night in Canada” play-by-play man Jim Hughson.
If you’d been there that night, you would have felt the deflated, defeated feeling in the building. Radio talk show guys were already discussing the firing of Claude Julien, and newspaper writers had crafted their ledes of how the Bruins had feebly faltered at the hands of Toronto.
Then the roof caved in on the Leafs. And Toronto hasn’t come that close to beating the Bruins in the playoffs since.
So blame Frattin. The Leafs did. They traded him to Los Angeles that summer. Gotta blame somebody, right?
Of course, Toronto’s ugly playoff drought against the Bruins also could have ended in Game 7 in 2018, but it didn’t. It could have ended with the Leafs holding a 3-2 series lead in 2019, but then Toronto’s finest could only score three goals in the final two games and went down to defeat again.
Which brings us to 2024, and another meeting between the two clubs. This time, someone of a conspiratorial mindset might think that this matchup was deliberately orchestrated by the Bruins, another chance to pummel the Leafs.
All Boston had to do, after all, was beat hapless Ottawa at home on Tuesday night to win the Atlantic Division. Instead, the Bruins made Anton Forsberg look like Vladimír Dzurilla and mailed in a 3-1 loss. That allowed the Florida Panthers, who beat the Leafs that night, to win the division and allowed the Bruins to draw the Leafs in the first round.
Was that Boston’s preference all along? If you had Boston’s record against Toronto, wouldn’t you have done the same? The Leafs haven’t bested the Bruins in a playoff series since 1959, and currently are on a seven-game regular-season losing streak against their Atlantic Division “rival.”
Just this season, it’s been all Boston. Four games, four wins. The Bruins held the powerful Toronto offence to nine goals and the vaunted Leafs power play to nine per cent efficiency. Boston goes right at the strengths of the Leafs and takes them away.
If teams were permitted to choose their first-round playoff opponent, we can agree the Leafs would have been Boston’s No. 1 pick. And maybe that’s exactly the preference the Bruins expressed in losing to the Senators.
Were they focused on anything except goals for Auston Matthews, the Leafs would be insulted by such a theory. But they watched Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett and various other Panthers disdainfully target Toronto captain John Tavares all game Tuesday night, so it’s not clear what, if anything, gets under the skin of Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and Morgan Rielly. Well, other than Ridly Greig.
The Leafs’ core once again showed its preference to remain above the fray and let the likes of Ryan Reaves and Simon Benoit do the dirty work against the Panthers, a two-tiered team approach that hasn’t been very productive in recent playoff campaigns.
The Panthers stunned the Bruins in the first round last year largely by having everyone on the roster willing to get in the grills of Brad Marchand, David Pastrnak and other top Boston skaters, an approach Boston didn’t appreciate and clearly wasn’t ready for. Are the Leafs capable of doing that over a long series? Unlikely. It’s just not in their collective DNA.
Instead, they will once again hope the power play doesn’t go to sleep and the big paycheques score lots of goals or it will be yet another short spring of Leafs playoff hockey.
It would seem the only thing getting in Boston’s way this spring against the Leafs would be the threat of overconfidence. How is Bruins coach Jim Montgomery going to fight that internal enemy?
The Bruins got the first-round opponent they had to want, and now will go into the series as heavy favourites. Montgomery may have the hardest job in hockey right now.
How to make his Bruins fear the Leafs?