The Maple Leafs are broken. Yes, the Florida Panthers are built to break teams, to hit and pressure them until they crack, and they鈥檙e the defending Stanley Cup champs, yes. Losing a Game 7 to the Panthers is understandable.
But how you lose matters, and the Leafs broke. This wasn鈥檛 even the banjo-tight Game 7 loss to Montreal in 2021, which was the true nadir of this era, really, until Sunday night. This was worse, and so was Game 5 last Wednesday. No serious hockey team loses those two games by 6-1 scores at home.
鈥淚 don’t think the moment’s too big for them,鈥 said Leafs coach Craig Berube after Game 7. 鈥淲e went to Ottawa, won Game 6 and won a series. We went into Florida, won Game 6 to make it a Game 7. So the moment鈥檚 not too big. For me, it’s all between the ears. It’s a mindset. These guys are capable of doing it. You just got to execute it, and we didn’t execute it. We didn’t execute it in Game 5. We didn’t execute it in Game 7. You know, I don’t have an answer for that 鈥 why 鈥 but that’s the bottom line.鈥
In 2022, then-coach Sheldon Keefe summed up the devilry of this core. He said, 鈥淲e know what our team is capable of doing. Maybe that’s the problem, (the players) know what they’re capable of doing.鈥 From Auston Matthews to Mitch Marner, from William Nylander to John Tavares and Morgan Rielly and beyond, these Leafs can be great, and that makes it so much worse when they aren鈥檛. In this series, the Leafs took control of play for long stretches, and looked like a prime Berube playoff team at times; they did it聽in the second half of the first period of Game 7.
And after getting the first 26 shot attempts of the game in the first, the Panthers out-attempted 海角社区官网40-14 in the second and blew the game open. Again, Game 5 and Game 7 showed this 海角社区官网team has a deep, unshakeable fragility. They didn鈥檛 know where the right competitive edge was, didn鈥檛 trust one another and played like they expected to lose. Matthews and Marner can talk about passengers, which was an evident crack in the room on a night where the Tavares-Nylander line got absolutely buried.
But Matthews and Marner got their asses kicked in Game 5, and accomplished nothing in Game 7. Yes, as my colleague Dave Feschuk writes, the Leafs should try something new.
The way this team crumpled is why the Augean stables need to be cleaned out. Maybe Marner will walk in free agency, and Tavares, too 鈥 Tavares said he wanted to come back after Game 7, and Marner definitely didn鈥檛 鈥 or maybe, less likely, the Leafs somehow re-sign both in what is finally a rising cap era.
But what do we keep talking about with this team? Demons and scars, demons and scars. What does that look like? It looks like a team that clearly didn鈥檛 trust themselves or each other enough, and whose best players cannot set a tone that the rest of the team can follow. Serious teams don鈥檛 watch themselves get devoured like that.
And whoever stays will carry that failure into next season, into any future playoff games, piled on all the baggage 海角社区官网already carries. The front office set this whole cataclysm in motion: team president Brendan Shanahan and then-GM Kyle Dubas split in 2023, in the last moment they could have changed the core without losing a player for nothing. Shanahan and general manager Brad Treliving built an incredibly top-heavy team this year, which meant the core players who had failed under pressure before had more pressure on them than ever.
So, Games 5 and 7 were the defining collapses of the Shanahan era and ethos of stability. Several Panthers talked about how the pressure of 海角社区官网has a cost, as Florida coach Paul Maurice put it. And that鈥檚 true, sure. That鈥檚 the dynamic of every Canadian team, only so much bigger.
鈥淚 was actually saying this last night to some of the guys: If their team was not in Toronto, dealing with all the crazy surface stuff outside of it, like, they’d be an unbelievable team, and such a hard team to play,鈥 Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk told the 鈥淪pittin鈥 Chiclets鈥 podcast Monday morning. 鈥淭hey just have so much to deal with, and I feel bad.鈥
But Edmonton reached Game 7 of the Cup final against these Panthers last year, and played their hearts out. Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg have reached a conference final or a final in the last 10 years. The Vancouver Canucks have more series wins in the past nine years than the Leafs do, and they only made the playoffs twice.
These Leafs broke, clearly and completely, in front of everyone. And no matter what changes 鈥 and every single thing should finally be on the table 鈥 that failure, deeper than any that came before it, will remain a part of who they are.
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