Can the Maple Leafs finally flip their playoff script?
Well, they did for one night. They did it because their best players took it upon themselves to be difference makers. And they'll need to do it one more time
After every morning skate in the NHL, whether it’s during the regular season or the playoffs, once the coach speaks to the assembled media, he huddles with the TV people for a private chat to give them talking points for that night’s broadcast. That’s where they get a lot of the tidbits they throw out during stoppages in play.
Toronto Maple Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe went through that ritual Tuesday morning, hours before his team took the ice for Game 5 of its first-round series against the Tampa Bay Lightning. In that conversation, he mentioned that it really didn’t matter who generated the offense for his team. He must have known as the words were exiting his mouth how preposterous they must have sounded.
Because Colin Blackwell and Pierre Engvall were never, ever going to be the ones to change the tone of this series. As you wade through the accounts of the Maple Leafs’ 4-3 win over the Lightning to take a 3-2 series lead, you’ll probably read a lot about a speech Jason Spezza made to his teammates after they came out of the first period having been outshot 14-4 and outscored 2-0, all the while looking like a group for whom the moment was once again too big. There will be people who will earmark that speech as the reason the Leafs won.
Don’t buy it for a minute. Spezza is a wonderful guy and a respected veteran, but it would be a stretch of enormous proportion to buy the notion that a 38-year-old left winger who is averaging fewer than nine minutes a game was the one to turn the tide of this series. Spezza is a former star who has become a good-in-the-room guy at this stage of his career, but he no longer has the capacity to be a difference maker. This series has, and will continue, to rest on the shoulders of the players who are the most valuable and highly paid. And the reason why the Maple Leafs are one game away, again, from advancing to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since the George W. Bush administration (first term!) is because their core four stars and the goaltender upon whom the GM staked his reputation dragged them into the fight and took it upon themselves to have an impact. They flipped the script, both in the game and the series.
Going into Game 5, there was a video prominently circulated on social media of William Nylander pulling up instead of engaging in a puck battle with Lightning defenseman Erik Cernak in Game 4. It epitomized the standard to which Nylander is held and once again proved he might be the most polarizing player on this roster. All he did in Game 4 was be the best player on the ice, a driver of offense and an inspired player. As Keefe said, early 2-0 leads in this series have had a way of quickly morphing into 5-0 insurmountable obstacles and Nylander was not about to allow that to happen.
John Tavares, the aging and proud veteran whose contribution in the first two games was two assists, was a beast with the puck in the offensive zone, scoring the Leafs’ first goal of the game and adding an assist on the second. Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews, the two highest-paid players on the roster, combined on the game-winning goal on what looked a lot like a set play. And none of this happens if Jack Campbell, who allowed two goals on the first four shots he faced, doesn’t revert back to the first-quarter-of-the-season Jack Campbell to give his team an opportunity to come back.
“That’s what you’re looking for in a game like this,” Keefe said. “You need your best people to step up and make a difference and we certainly did that.”
For 20 minutes, it looked as though the Leafs were paralyzed with fear. The ghosts of playoff past were haunting them and even though they were engaged and hungry, they looked lost and uninterested. Much of the conversation in the press box after the first period was whether or not the Leafs would fire Keefe after this series loss and throw a Brinks truck at Barry Trotz. But this team deserves a ton of credit for how it turned the game around. “I thought we got to a point in the second period where we got a hold of the game,” Keefe said. “And we were just comin’ and comin’ and comin’ and the other team can’t really disrupt you and they looked tired. And that gave our team life. You could see it, feel it on the bench, guys were talking about it. And that gave us huge confidence.”
For one night, the Maple Leafs flipped the script in a series that has defied any sense of logic. They will have to do it one more time in order to chase away their playoff demons. Easier said than done. Last spring, they had a 3-1 series lead on the worst team in the playoff tournament and watched as it slipped through their fingers. Since the Leafs started making the playoffs again in 2017, they have a 3-8 record in elimination games. There is still a ton of baggage to be shed here and they’re playing the back-to-back Stanley Cup champs, a team that has seen everything and done everything in the NHL post-season.
But if the Leafs do manage to pull this one out, they can look back to the night of Game 5 in the 2022 playoffs as the night they finally put on their big-boy pants and handled adversity head-on rather than wilting under pressure.