Pressure not an issue for Leafs? Tell that to the fans
Game Seven.
There are those who like to call them, when strung together, the greatest two words in sports. Those people would not be Maple Leafs fans of recent vintage. There’s not much evidence to suggest they’re members of the Maple Leafs, either.
Because as much as Toronto’s NHL team spent Sunday attempting to put a brave face on Monday’s looming Game 7 against the
Montreal Canadiens — as much as they attempted to characterize it as an exciting “opportunity,” rather than the lamentable product of a series of unforgivably squandered ones — it doesn’t take a qualified sports psychologist to see what’s happening here.
Mike Babcock, the former Leafs coach, liked to call it “the pucker factor.” Which was a fun phrase to toss around in the days when the young Leafs styled themselves as nothing-to-lose underdogs facing more heavily favoured opponents who, Babcock theorized, might squeeze their sticks too tightly under the overbearing weight of expectation.
Now, well past the seven-year mark of the Shana-plan, in the fifth season starring Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, the sweat’s building on Toronto’s brow.
Now it’s the Leafs, perhaps burdened by their history of big-moment failure — including losses in their three most recent Game 7s, not to mention last spring’s series-deciding Game 5 against Columbus — who appear to be wilting in the heat. Which is why this particular Game 7 is less eagerly anticipated than it is seriously dreaded.
It certainly wasn’t supposed to be necessary. This season was supposed to be different. With the Leafs breezing through the Canadian division schedule in first place thanks to a new and improved defensive approach, this series wasn’t supposed to be close. The Leafs dominated their 10 regular-season meetings with the Canadiens, earning 15 of the possible 20 points in the standings. And after the Leafs shook off John Tavares’s scary injury in a Game 1 loss to take a commanding 3-1 series lead, the first playoff meeting of the NHL’s two oldest franchises since 1979 had the look of a mismatch.
But thanks to Toronto’s slowstarting overtime losses in Games 5 and 6, here we go again. Just when they’d convinced some observers, including this one, that they’d sufficiently changed, they’re suddenly one loss away from their most humiliating collapse in recent memory.
And yes, losing Monday’s Game 7, no matter how it happens, would rank as more pathetic than Toronto’s infamous blowing of a 4-1 lead to the Bruins in the dying minutes of a Game 7 in 2013. That menacing Boston team, only two years removed from winning the Stanley Cup, made it to the Cup final that spring. This Canadiens squad, as hard as it has fought, and as formidable as Carey Price has proven to be, is expected to go no such place.
On Saturday night in Montreal, the Leafs appeared pained and stunned. A day later, Toronto head coach Sheldon Keefe attempted to frame Monday’s match as an enviable chance at long-awaited glory. The Leafs, for all the doomsaying, are one win away from advancing in the playoffs for the first time since 2004.
“As much as it sucks how we got here, and what we’ve been through the last couple of games — and we hate it — I really feel, frankly, that we are right where we’re supposed to be,” Keefe was saying on Sunday. Never mind that, on the continuum of NHL success, eking out one measly series against an inferior opponent would amount to clearing the lowest of possible bars. With his team’s season crumbling in front of his eyes, what’s a coach to do but tell lies?
“I don’t think pressure is an issue here,” Keefe claimed after Saturday’s loss, convincing precisely nobody.
Alas, there’s a reason the Leafs are now 0-6 in potential series-clinching games in the Matthews-Marner era. There’s a reason why, in those six games, they’ve been outscored by more than a 2-to-1 ratio — 26-12, to be exact. Heading into Monday, they’ve yet to prove they possess the collective stomach for high-stakes hockey. Matthews and Marner, specifically, have registered one goal between them and two points apiece in those six potential closeout situations. They’ve got one goal between them and four points apiece in this series.
And certainly Keefe wasn’t in the mood to turn down the heat on his stars.
“In a game of this magnitude, those guys need to be difference makers for us,” Keefe said. “We’re not down on their game and how they’ve played. I think they’ve played really well. I’ve gone through and looked at the chances they’ve had, and just how fine a line it is from really breaking out and having huge offensive numbers to being where they’re at here now.”
It’s a fine line, indeed. Matthews, who led the NHL with 41 goals in 52 games, has just one playoff goal, even though he leads the series with 32 shots on goal, not to mention a couple of pinged posts. Marner has logged more ice time than any Leaf other than Morgan Rielly, but if the series ends unhappily he’ll be dogged for some time for his brain cramp of a puck-over-glass penalty that helped turn Game 6 in Montreal’s favour.
Even if the Leafs win, in some ways they’ve already lost something. They’ve allowed the Winnipeg Jets, the secondround opponent awaiting the Toronto-Montreal winner, extra rest and recuperation after a first-round sweep of the Oilers. They’ve incurred a key Game 6 injury, one that threatens to keep top-pair defenceman Jake Muzzin out of Game 7 and perhaps beyond, if there is a beyond. (Muzzin, who the club said underwent undisclosed tests on Sunday, hasn’t yet been ruled out of action but seems a likely scratch.)
More than any of that, they’ve made Monday night’s game another referendum on the top-heavy roster construction that sees four players earn 50 per cent of the salary cap. They’ve rekindled the occasional debate about whether Matthews and Marner, the two highest-paid players in the NHL this season as measured by their respective salaries, are merely regular-season savants incapable of producing when it matters most.
“We’re facing a Game 7 situation, a very difficult task at a time when the other team has momentum, at a time when you start to doubt and question yourself, and people on the outside start to doubt and question you,” Keefe said. “I think it’s an incredible opportunity for our team.”
Come late Monday, it’ll either be seen as an opportunity seized or an all-time albatross descended. It’ll either be an occasion to string together the two greatest words in Toronto sports — “Leafs advance” — or a moment of déjà vu for a tortured faithful who somehow knew the ending before the sounding of the final horn.