Home is where you lay an egg
Leafs might be better off starting playoffs on the road, as Lightning dominate in Toronto
With the Maple Leafs four points behind the Florida Panthers for second place in the Atlantic Division, the modus operandi for the regular-season stretch run ought to be simple enough. Keep pushing.
The Panthers are in free fall, after all, losers of eight of their past 10 games. So the conventional wisdom says it only makes sense for the Leafs to use the final seven games of the regular season to do their best to sprint past the Panthers and earn the coveted home-ice advantage for their first-round playoff series.
Or does it? Home ice certainly hasn’t provided a discernable edge to the Leafs during the regular season. After Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to the Lightning at Scotiabank Arena, Toronto has reeled off one more win on the road than they have at home so far this season, while playing one fewer road game. With two more victories in their four remaining away dates, the Maple Leafs can break the franchise single-season record of 23 road wins.
That was one reason not to sweat the rough spots in Wednesday’s loss to the surging Lightning. It wasn’t optimal that starting netminder Joseph Woll gave up a goal on a game’s first shot for the third time in four starts and lost for the fifth time in seven games since returning from injury.
And, yes, there were plenty of defensive lapses in front of Woll that won’t be tolerable come the postseason. Most egregious: On the goal that made it 2-1, Tampa Bay centreman Brayden Point somehow found himself all alone in front of Woll with plenty of time for a leisurely deke, what with Toronto centreman David Kampf and defencemen Ilya Lyubushkin and T.J. Brodie scattered hither and yon.
On a night that included a handful of similar defensive lowlights, and Auston Matthews’s 63rd goal of the season on an otherwise unbeatable Andrei Vasilevskiy, here was the bottom line: From here on out for the Leafs, it’s not about winning the remaining seven regular-season games so much as it’s about getting ready to win a seven-game series.
There’s a difference between the two objectives. As Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe made clear Wednesday, pushing for home ice is not a priority. Being primed to thrive in Game 1 most certainly is.
No one is suggesting they attend the Jontay Porter School of Suspicious Professional Underperformance. But let’s just say that between now and the playoffs, walking the line between staying healthy and staying sharp is a lot more important than piling up points.
“It’s more of a focus on your team getting prepared, and you see where the chips fall. We were in this situation last season as well, pretty similar. I don’t think we saw (home ice) much of anything to look at or aspire to,” Keefe said Wednesday. “We’ve been good in both places. We’ve had home ice in the past (in the playoffs).”
Keefe didn’t elaborate from there. But the facts are the facts. Last season, when the Leafs won their first post-season series in 19 years, they earned three of the four required wins in Tampa. Toronto’s only win of its five-game second-round bowout to the Panthers also came in the state of Florida. Add it up, and Toronto was 1-5 at Scotiabank Arena in last year’s playoffs.
All told, they’re 12-12 on the road and 9-17 at home in the post-season in the Matthews-Marner era. There are 15 teams that have played at least 20 home playoff games going back to 2016-17. Toronto’s .346 home playoff winning percentage ranks dead last among them.
Why have they been so bad at home? Maybe it’s the pressure. Maybe it’s the folks in the platinum seats who don’t bother to reemerge from their shrimp-andchardonnay intermissions until the next period is well underway.
Or maybe it’s that life on the road as a pro athlete — with chartered air travel, rooms at the Ritz and none of the inherent home-front noise — amounts to the most comfortable of bubbles. Heck, at times recently, the Leafs have tried to make home games feel more like road games, sequestering in Toronto-area hotels during the playoffs.
“I’m not sure there’s even a remote advantage in (playoff homeice advantage),” Florida coach Paul Maurice said in Toronto this week. “(The Panthers and Leafs are) both really good road teams. So what’s the advantage?”
That’s the point: If there’s no edge to be gleaned by the Leafs, there’s little point pushing the limits to catch the Panthers.
“I think it’s really about who’s most prepared to play and who has their game in order when the time comes,” Keefe said.
“Wherever the games are played, we’ll be ready.”
Lightning 4
Maple Leafs 1 Next: Saturday at Canadiens