Different team, same ghosts for the Maple Leafs to chase away in Boston

It doesn’t feel like that long ago does it? But 2019 really is a lifetime ago in the world of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Consider their lineup in Game 7 against the Boston Bruins that spring:

Almost everyone is gone.

Ron Hainsey, Patrick Marleau, Tyler Ennis, and Jake Muzzin are all retired. Jake Gardiner has been out of the NHL for years. Frederik Gauthier is playing in Switzerland.

Andreas Johnsson, Kasperi Kapanen, Trevor Moore, Frederik Andersen, Connor Brown, and Zach Hyman have all long since moved on.

So has the coach from that team, Mike Babcock. Game 7 was the last playoff game coached for the Leafs (or any other NHL team).

Nazem Kadri’s last game for the Leafs came earlier in that series.

The only remaining links from the 2018-19 Leafs (on the ice anyway) are the ones that matter most: Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, Morgan Rielly, John Tavares, and William Nylander. But even they aren’t really the same.

Matthews and Marner were 21-year-olds in their third NHL seasons. Matthews had already proved he could score like few others – he had 37 goals in 68 games that regular season – but he wasn’t this. He wasn’t in the running for his second Hart Trophy. He didn’t own the two highest-scoring seasons in Leafs’ history.

Auston Matthews during the 2019 playoffs, when he was still just a kid. (Kevin Sousa / NHLI via Getty Images)

Marner and Nylander were still years away from being fully formed NHL stars (though Marner was excellent in that series).

All of which is to say: This isn’t 2019. These aren’t the same Leafs about to face the Bruins in the playoffs. And yet, the ghosts haven’t gone anywhere, have they?

The Leafs are still haunted by postseason failure. They’re still that team searching for something more when it matters, with just a single playoff round won since that 5-1 loss to the Bruins in Game 7.

Might this year finally be different? There are legitimate reasons to think that maybe it will be.

Matthews, above all, is coming off the greatest season in Leafs history, and one of the greatest seasons by anyone, period, in NHL history. He is arguably the top two-way player in hockey. At some point, he’s going to have a postseason when he just stomps all over everyone.

It just hasn’t happened yet.

Matthews has produced 0.50 goals and 0.88 points per game in the playoffs – down from the 0.66 and 1.16 he’s averaged in the regular season. He’s had moments – a two-goal Game 4 against Tampa last spring, the opening goal in Game 6 a few nights later – but not enough of them, especially when it counts most, and no prolonged run of domination.

Over his 50 career playoff games, the Leafs are about even at five-on-five when he’s on the ice – 32-30. (The underlying numbers are much stronger for what it’s worth.)

He might be at the peak of his powers now though. And the Leafs have unlocked (via an injury to Marner in Boston, oddly enough) something new and interesting in his partnership with Max Domi and Tyler Bertuzzi. In their nearly 150 minutes together, the Leafs have hammered teams – winning 60 percent of the actual goals and over 66 percent of the expected goals.

Matthews played alongside Kapanen and Johnsson in the 2019 series. He still scored three five-on-five goals in the series and five overall (including at least one in Games 3, 4, 5, and 6).

He’s also increasingly had his way against the Bruins, scoring nine goals in his last nine games against them, including game-tying goals in November and December games that helped the Leafs net an eventual point each time. (Matthews’ season really turned with a two-goal outing in Boston on Dec. 2.)

There’s no Patrice Bergeron or Zdeno Chara for him to contend with in this series and the Bruins aren’t quite the defensive juggernaut they were in the past. Nor have they had an answer for this version of Matthews. Shot attempts were 86-56 in his five-on-five minutes against Boston during the regular season.

The Bruins will deploy some combination of Charlie McAvoy, Matt Grzelcyk, Hampus Lindholm, and the long and large Brandon Carlo to try to stop him in this series. Up front, Boston figures to use the line of Charlie Coyle, Brad Marchand, and Jake DeBrusk opposite the Matthews’ group, a matchup that Keefe probably has no problem with in Boston or at home in Toronto.

Things get more interesting from there.

Whether he’s playing with Matthews or not, the Leafs need the Marner of 2019 to meet with the Marner of today. Marner is a better player now at 26 than he was then. However, the lightness to his game in that 2019 series – the freedom he showed in posting nine points in seven games while earning rave reviews from the Bruins – has been largely absent in every playoff series since, especially in the big moments.

If Matthews and Marner are the two best players in this series, the Leafs should advance to the second round.

What could break the series open for the Leafs: If Marner, Tavares, and Nylander playing together can put the Bruins in the spin cycle during their shifts together. That trio wasn’t a thing for the Leafs in any of the four regular-season matchups, nor for that matter, was the Bertuzzi-Matthews-Domi combination.

The Leafs got Bertuzzi and Domi, in particular, for just this time of year, for the extra bite and scoring sizzle they could bring to a playoff series.

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Nylander was held without a goal and registered only two assists in four outings against the Bruins during the regular season. The Leafs need the Nylander of the first two-plus months of the season to emerge again starting in Game 1. It’s worth recalling that Nylander was still in a contract dispute-related funk back in the 2019 playoffs — and playing centre with Kadri suspended.

Can the Leafs get away with a Pontus Holmberg-led third line, if that’s the route they choose? Might David Kämpf become more important in this series?

Boston will want to exploit the Leafs’ bottom two units any chance they get, whether that’s with a third line of James van Riemsdyk, Morgan Geekie, and Trent Frederic that’s hammered teams this season – 69 percent expected goals in 123 minutes – or with the David Pastrnak-led unit.

Maybe the biggest non-goaltending question for the Leafs: Can this defence hold up against the Bruins?

During the last two regular-season games against Boston in March, the answer was no. The Toronto back-end was exposed, at times, by the Bruins’ will and brute force around the net and on the forecheck, Timothy Liljegren especially. The Simon Benoit–Jake McCabe pairing was broken up after the first of those games.

Are those two together going to be up to the challenge of slowing down Pastrnak, who has destroyed the Leafs with 19 goals and 36 points in 28 career games? It will have to be a collective approach, with all three pairs playing a role.

Will the front office’s bet on that size on the back end pay off? It was after a 4-1 loss to the Bruins on March 4 that Keefe declared, “They defended their net a lot better than we defended ours.”

Joel Edmundson became a Leaf later that week, joining Ilya Lybushkin on the revamped Toronto back end.

Edmundson, Lyubushkin, and Benoit especially will be charged with keeping the Bruins away from the paint in this series. Can they move pucks effectively enough under heavy pressure?

Can a Leaf penalty kill that was beaten three times on 10 attempts by the Bruins in the regular season find a way to contain Pastrnak and his devastating one-timer?

Can the Leafs avoid twisting themselves in knots when Marchand does Marchand things? Marchand goaded McCabe and Domi into penalties in that last meeting alone.

Will this team be able to lock down leads and not beat themselves against the Bruins?

Marchand has pestered the Leafs repeatedly over the years. (Brian Fluharty / USA Today)

The Leafs’ best chance at winning the special teams battle might just be with their power play. It was bad down the stretch, obviously, and bad against the Bruins (1-11) this season, but there were glimmers of hope for the reunited PP1 down the stretch.

The Bruins had the seventh-best penalty kill in hockey during the regular season.

This series might end up coming down to whether the Leafs can’t keep things close in the crease opposite a Boston team that owned the third-best goaltending in the league during the regular season.

Which Ilya Samsonov will show up? Will it be the guy who mostly outdueled Andrei Vasilevskiy last spring or the one who oozed real unease at times this season? If they need him, is Joseph Woll up to the task? He was beaten for eight goals in those two March starts against the Bruins.

Can the Leafs win in Boston? Perhaps no building in the league inspires so much angst for the Leafs, losers in five of their last six games there.

It is five years later and a completely different team, a better one in most respects given the improvement of the stars. But it’s perhaps fitting still that it’s the Bruins they face again. The Leafs took down one playoff nemesis last spring (Tampa) but this one looms even larger thanks to 2013, 2018, and especially 2019.

The direction of the franchise changed after that last series. The Leafs grew into a different team over the years that followed, one of the better teams in the league but a team with playoff ghosts that haven’t quite gone away. The ghosts from Boston especially. Those haven’t been chased off.

Not yet.

(Top photo: Winslow Townson / USA Today)

–Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, and Hockey Reference