The Toronto Maple Leafs were up 1-0 on the Ottawa Senators late in the first period on Feb. 10 when Mitch Marner turned a puck over in the neutral zone. The Senators raced the other way and scored.
They eventually beat the Leafs in a game that became all about Morgan Rielly and his reaction to Ridly Greig hammering a puck into an empty net, but other matters concerned the Leafs and their head coach Sheldon Keefe that night.
Keefe called the play that led to Claude Giroux’s goal “egregious.” “And that’s our best people,” he said. “And probably the last two minutes of the first period our best people, I thought, let us down there.”
Rielly would get a five-game suspension for his actions. The Leafs, in his absence, would rip off five straight wins, two more when he returned, and nine of 10 overall.
If there was one defining quality about the 2023-24 Leafs during the regular season, it was that. When they embarrassed themselves, when they appeared to hit rock bottom, like the night in December when they surrendered nine (!) goals to Buffalo, they responded.
What now?
Is there any life left in the Leafs? They look dead after a Game 4 loss to the Boston Bruins in which they went down 3-0, struggled to generate offence or urgency until the game was already lost, and seemed to splinter at the seams with contentious bickering on the bench.
GO DEEPER
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Can they respond again, when the stakes are much, much higher, in Game 5? And if they do, will it be fleeting? Can they mount a serious comeback? Or will they go out with a whimper like so many times in the past?
That’s been the thing with these Leafs over the years — the Leafs of Brendan Shanahan, Keefe, Auston Matthews, Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Rielly. When the games have mattered most, they’ve mostly floundered.
The Leafs are 3-10 in elimination games since 2019. Two of those wins came last spring — one a Game 6 victory that closed out the Tampa Bay Lightning and launched the team into the second round for the first time since 2004, the other a 2-1 Game 4 win over the Florida Panthers that staved off a sweep and a second-round loss that would come two days later.
This has not been a big-game team historically, a team that rises to the moment.
Up 3-2 in the series over Boston in 2019, the Leafs lost 4-2 in Game 6 at home and then were flattened 5-1 by the Bruins in Game 7.
It took a miraculous third-period comeback and OT winner from Matthews for the Leafs to avoid a loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets in Game 4 of the 2020 play-in round. Two days later, they were shut out by Columbus in Game 5.
The path looked set for the Leafs to march deep into the postseason in 2021. A 3-1 series lead over the Montreal Canadiens evaporated in no time with OT losses in Games 5 and 6 and a flat performance in a Game 7 loss at home.
The Leafs scored their first and only goal that night with less than two minutes left in the third period.
In 2022, the Leafs had two chances to close out the Lightning and couldn’t do it. They scored once in Game 7.
Again and again, it’s been the stars at the very core of the team who haven’t come through when it matters most. It’s been true through four games of this series, albeit with some asterisks.
Matthews played maybe his best playoff game as a Leaf in Game 2. A goal, two primary assists, eight shots, six hits and wins on 70 percent of his faceoffs. Then he got sick and his performance, not surprisingly, dipped. Matthews went without a point in Games 3 and 4 and posted a total of four shots.
According to Keefe, he was pulled from Game 4 after two periods by team doctors.
“For whatever reason, it’s not one of those everyday types of illnesses that sort of come and go,” Keefe said a day later. “This one has lingered and the effects have lingered and gotten worse when he’s on the ice asserting himself.”
The Leafs, meanwhile, have been asking Tavares and Marner to go head-to-head with David Pastrnak and the Boston top line. And while they’ve succeeded in slowing that group down, they’ve not been able to generate anything of consequence offensively, aside from Marner setting up Matthew Knies for a goal in Game 3.
Marner has two points in the series. Tavares has one, the lone power-play goal the Leafs have scored.
Nylander, meanwhile, was absent for Games 1-3 for reasons that neither he nor the team have clarified. He looked like someone racing to catch up to the pace and intensity of playoff hockey in Game 4. He had five of his eight shot attempts blocked.
“He looked to me like a guy that’s definitely adjusting to the series and what’s required in the series to be able to have success,” Keefe said. “Some of the things that he was looking to do aren’t available.”
Nylander returned to the Leafs lineup in Game 4. (Nick Turchiaro / USA Today)
None of those asterisks — injuries, illness, deployment — will matter if the Leafs lose this series.
And while a comeback seems unlikely now, it also seemed unlikely for the Panthers against the Bruins in just this spot last spring — down 3-1 heading into Game 5. Florida won that game in overtime, won a wild Game 6 with seven goals and then won Game 7, again in OT.
For the Leafs, any kind of comeback may have to start with the power play, which has just the one goal on 14 opportunities in four games and seems to be a central focus for Keefe heading into Game 5.
Can Keefe and Guy Boucher, who runs the power play, come up with anything new to shake this group from a funk that’s been ongoing now for months? It seems like forever ago now, but this is a team that scored on 50 percent of its power plays in February — 14 for 28, with eight goals combined by Matthews and Nylander.
What’s interesting about that stretch? The Leafs were varying the personnel on their No. 1 unit from night to night.
Sometimes it was Rielly quarterbacking things from the top. Other times it was Timothy Liljegren. Tavares was briefly dropped from PP1 for Tyler Bertuzzi. Is there a look in that mix that the Leafs can go back to? (The more I’ve thought, the more I wonder if the Leafs should split up the stars as the Bruins did ahead of the postseason, with Matthews and Nylander on one unit and Marner and Tavares on another. The No. 1 unit feels stale. A split might freshen things up and create some competition. It’s just late, on the verge of elimination, to make that change.)
“We’ll consider and talk about everything,” Keefe said on Sunday afternoon.
The Leafs need to find a way to generate more offensively in general if they have any hope of keeping their season alive. Can they get Tavares starting on offence more often? The Leafs’ 33-year-old captain has an offensive faceoff percentage of 35 percent in this series. He’s been asked to dig out from defensive zone draw after defensive zone draw and then create offence. It might be too much to ask at this point in his career.
Tavares doesn’t have a point at five-on-five in this series.
What makes it tricky for the coaching staff: Where do they turn for those D-zone faceoffs otherwise?
They could increase David Kämpf’s role in this series and have him try to do the thing he once did to pretty good effect (with better help): Get stuffed in the defensive zone and make it out anyway. But if they play Kämpf more, they’re playing someone who won’t help the cause one bit offensively.
Then again, maybe the tradeoff is worth it if it frees Tavares’ line (whoever is on it) up for more offence.
The Leafs with the best chance of scoring on any given night: Matthews, Nylander, and then Tavares or Marner.
There has to be more opportunity, better opportunity created, for two of those guys to come through. The coaching staff can engineer it with their lineup and deployment.
So far, the Leafs have been depending on Matthews’ line and Matthews’ line alone for offence. It worked only one time.
Whether it’s Ilya Samsonov or, more likely, Joseph Woll in Game 5, the Leafs need to finally win the goalie battle to prolong this series.
Jeremy Swayman and Linus Ullmark have combined to post a .944 save percentage in this series.
Samsonov? He’s sitting at .881.
It was Woll (with Samsonov injured) who helped the Leafs keep their season alive against the Panthers in Game 4 of the second round last spring. He stopped 24 of 25 shots in a 2-1 win.
The Leafs are looking for hope anywhere they can find it right now.
“This series and these games are a lot closer than they may appear,” Keefe said. “And last time we went to Boston (in Game 2) we were able to pull out a very good and important win. And throughout the season, we’ve responded well, particularly on the road.”
“We’re still alive here in this series,” the Leafs coach said.
(Top photo of Auston Matthews: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)
