Curtain coming down on another disappearing act
The current crisis in Leafland, with the local heroes down 3-1 in a series one loss away from another humiliating playoff washout, comes down to the most fundamental of hockey concepts.
The very idea of the game is to get the black puck over the red goal line. And funny enough, it’s the singular hockey skill in which the Maple Leafs, under certain conditions, are undeniably gifted. During the regular season, no team has scored at a higher rate than Toronto since that day in 2016 when Auston Matthews potted four in his NHL debut.
And yet, during the playoffs, spring after spring, the magic is somehow drained from Toronto’s sticks. At a time of year when ratcheted-up defences unleash a more vicious species of guard dog into the slot, the Leafs perennially morph into one the lowest-scoring teams in the league.
“Offence is hard to come by,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said before the game, as if anyone who’s been watching his team needed to be reminded. “Goals are hard to come by.”
Perhaps it’s because playoff goals aren’t often scored with skill alone. They’re often scored with urgent forechecks and desperate net-front roughhousing. They’re often attributed to ferocity as much as finesse.
The bulk of Saturday’s Game 4 was bereft of any real urgency or palpable desperation from the home team. There wasn’t much skill displayed, either. Passes meant to go tape-to-tape went tape-toturnover. The Leafs were both emotionally ineffectual and technically inefficient. Considering the stakes, it was an inexcusable combination.
Post-season play is supposed to heighten a team’s intensity. Somehow it mostly seems to shrink the Leafs’.
Leafs general manager Brad Treliving tried to bolster this team by adding a dose of “snot” in the offseason. Saturday’s result, which saw the Leafs booed off the ice down 3-0 after two periods en route to losing 3-1, better resembled less appealing bodily excretions.
Matthews, who’d missed practices in the lead-up to the contest, didn’t even come out for the third period. He’s been sick, and also presumably sick of losing playoff games. Still, that doesn’t exactly explain why the most prolific regular-season goal scorer in the league has one goal in his most recent nine playoff games. William Nylander, playing in his first game in 10 days and his first of the playoffs after battling an undisclosed ailment, wasn’t much help.
Is scoring really this hard? The entire Leafs roster has scored a grand total of seven goals in four games. Zach Hyman, the former Leaf now playing in Edmonton, has six goals in three games by himself. Steven Stamkos, at age 34, has five playoff goals for the Lightning.
Mitch Marner provided Toronto’s only goal in Saturday’s obligatory third-period flash of furious desire. Not that it wasn’t welcomed, but it was too little, too late.
Even former Leaf James van Riemsdyk, who’ll turn 35 next month, showed some deft hands in making it 1-0 on Saturday, this after Toronto’s fourth line botched a breakout and van Riemsdyk was left alone in a vacated slot as the Leafs cheated for offence.
What are we to make of it, the Maple Leafs one loss away from their seventh opening-round elimination in eight playoff runs during the now 10-year-old Shanaplan? It’s an annual pattern repeating itself.
They’re getting out-goalied here, sure. The Bruins came into Saturday with a .940 team save percentage, the best in the playoffs. Toronto’s work in the blue paint, by contrast, came into the game at a middle-of-the-pack .874.
And Toronto sure isn’t getting much out of the so-called home-ice advantage. That’s six straight playoff losses at Scotiabank Arena.
But for the Leafs, ultimately it comes down to the inability to get the biscuit into the basket. Coming into Saturday, the Leafs had scored two or fewer goals in nine of their past 10 playoff games. Elsewhere in the league, it’s not as though other teams aren’t seeing their high-powered regular-season offence translate to the post-season scoreboard. Going back to the 2019 post-season, the Oilers and Avalanche are averaging 3.82 and 3.79 playoff goals a game, respectively — more than a goal a game apiece more than Toronto over that span.
It doesn’t help that the Leafs have a penalty kill that’s often hapless. When Brad Marchand scored the Boston power-play goal that made it 2-0 midway through the second period, it came after the Bruins picked the Leafs apart with pinpoint passing through gaping lanes. It’s inexcusable the Leafs have a power play that cannot figure it out. Toronto is 1-for-15 with the man advantage in the series.
A pre-game ceremony honoured the memory of Bob Cole, the “Hockey Night in Canada” play-byplay legend who died this week at age 90. Even Cole, who called some of the iconic goals of Leaf playoff runs of yore, would have had difficulty making Saturday’s performance sound compelling. High drama was Cole’s specialty. This was a low-energy letdown.