KNOCKOUT ROUND
Leafs bow out in another Game 7, but there was no choke this time, no wilting
Aw hell. Ah well.
Because snap, just like that … The road to perdition must run straight through the Toronto Maple Leafs.
A team built to win it all — or at least, for the love of King Clancy and all the saints, one friggin’ playoff round.
Nope. Instead, yet again descended into the abyss of post-season despair.
At home, in front of a bracing and embracing crowd that careered from expectant to jittery to, in the end, dumbstruck, the Leafs could not blunt the mettle of the Tampa Bay Lightning, falling 2-1. Falling … falling … falling …
Staggering out of the opening series in seven games, nine times out of nine they’ve blown the elimination acid test since 2018. Despite a headlong and desperate bid to tie the game with Jack Campbell out of the net, they could not break through, could not convert ample scoring chances. And at the horn, each of the players who’d been out there for the final futile push skated off on his own, bent at the waist,
gasping and forlorn.
Until their captain, John Tavares, led them all back to the handshake line with the victorious Bolts.
It was too soon, too raw, for any of the protagonists to offer perspective or a fitting epitaph afterwards. They honestly looked stunned, as if not knowing what to do with themselves.
“There were opportunities there, over the course of the game, good sequences,” said Morgan Rielly, longest tenured Leaf, and nobody had tried harder on this Saturday night at Scotiabank Arena — the only Leaf to get a puck past Andrei Vasilevskiy. “The outcome is very disappointing.”
Beyond disappointment and obviously beyond words in the moment, though Rielly tried, especially when asked if this one felt different from series past and dejections past.
“I’ve been thinking about that the last couple of minutes. It’s not right now. Because the feeling’s the same, the outcome’s the same. Whether or not there’s positives or whatever, it’s going to take some time to figure that out. Ultimately the outcome is the same, which is very disappointing.
“When the outcome is the same in the playoffs, it makes it different to reflect on it, much different than you have in the past. But with time,
I think we’ll get a chance to think a little more clearly, reflect with a little more clarity.”
There is an essence to this version of the Leafs, in the backwash of a glittery season — personal and collective glorious achievements. Those accomplishments haven’t been diminished, but they’ve suddenly paled, for now. It was always about the playoffs now. And that’s a reach that exceeded their grasp in the first chapter of the post-season.
“It’s hard to explain,” said a downcast Tavares. “It’s obviously frustrating. Hard to fathom ... I just told them they had lots of reasons to be proud. Yet lots of reasons to be devastated and upset. They gave us everything that they had. We came up short.
From Auston Matthews, who may hear the slags that he didn’t rise to the challenge of a Game 7 — not true, though he didn’t score, because he’d savoured the whole series and brought the goals: “We were on the wrong side of things tonight. It’s really frustrating, it’s really disappointing.
“They made one more play than us.”
So, Groundhog Day for Toronto, forced to live and relive the anguish of never being good enough when it mattered most. Except they were good enough.
That’s the head-banging consternation of it.
The better team lost Game 7 after the lesser team won Game 6. Which was why the series landed at Scotiabank Arena on Saturday night. It should have been over in Tampa on Thursday.
Of course, shoulda-beens don’t count for licorice curls. Sometimes it’s just bollixed happenstance, bad joss, and a millimetre off true.
There’s no blame to mete out here, no judgment. Don’t let the analysts hang a conjured up post-crying narrative to fit the circumstances.
Players have said over and over that there was no point in looking back at 2021 …2020 … any of the five post-season failures, but especially those where the Leafs beat themselves because they withered in the heat of a deciding game. But they’ll definitely be looking back at this one in the days, weeks and months ahead. Maybe even years because they stack up fast and you never know when the stars will align — those in the heavens and those on the ice — in quite this way again.
There was no choke this time, no wilting. Both these teams went fulltilt boogie and both had a lot to lose: The Lightning, as back-to-back and reigning Stanley Cup champions, with visions of dynasty dancing in their eyes; the Leafs as elite contenders yet perennially on the outside looking in.
On the morning of, William Nylander — a polarizing player but arguably the best performer over the past week — had made a forthright admission about the do-or-die duds in Toronto’s recent playoff history: “I think we came out flat in those games. Maybe a little bit scared to lose. We don’t got to be scared. We’re a great team.”
Greatness, however, isn’t measured in defeats. From Mitch Marner, who played his heart out: “We’ve got to be ready for the opportunity, got to take it head-on, not shy away from the light.” They didn’t shy away.
The Leafs had returned to Toronto knowing they’d been the superior side overall. They genuinely weren’t rattled by the Bolts prevailing and extending. Calmness imbued the club and chased the nerves.
“You don’t make it bigger than it is,” Keefe had said. “It’s big enough as it is.”
Confidence earned, off a boldface regular season and come-from-behind brass in the playoffs.
“Part of it through the whole season, we were right at the top of the league, we established home ice in a very difficult division and edged out this opponent in that regard for that home ice,” Keefe stressed. “Through this series, both teams have been going toe-to-toe with each other. Both teams have knocked the other on their ass a little bit. Both teams have picked themselves up and continued to go at it. We’ve been right there with back-to-back champ. Our guys have grown a ton of confidence in knowing that they belong in this moment.”
What they could not do, turned out, was go where this core of Leafs has never gone before: into the second round of the NHL playoffs. Where this team, in its half-dozen iterations since 2017, have never penetrated.
Such a ripe opportunity — to knock off the consecutive and reigning champs, a feat that hadn’t been accomplished by this franchise in the modern era; not since 1967, when their forebears extinguished the double-defending Montreal Canadiens. Which, by the way, was also the last time the Leafs copped a Cup.
But you know that.
The Leafs came out of the gate with a snootful, fearless. They pressed early and they pressed hard, had 10 shot attempts compared to Tampa’s five, against a netminder, Andrei Vasilevskiy, with five shutouts in his last five closeout games.
Tampa’s Nicholas Paul, who onehanded buried his first of the playoffs with one minute and thirty-six seconds left in the first period, struck again in the second after Rielly had tied it.
It was all scramble and grit after that.
No, they didn’t shy away.
But the light, the bright light of the playoffs, blinked to black.