TORONTO — The final buzzer came like sweet relief, like cold water poured over rising flames, extinguishing the chaos. Like a bit of much-needed mercy.
The last time these teams were on this sheet, the Toronto Maple Leafs looked like they might just have a shot here, like they might have an era-defining run in them. They’d outlasted the defending champs twice, running up a 2-0 series lead on the Florida Panthers that had them boarding a flight south looking the picture of steely optimism.
But it’s not just about the bobbing and weaving, the clean strikes. It’s not the moments where it feels precise, feels technical. The true test of whether you can make it through a bout isn’t what it looks like when it all goes right, when all the shots land and your opponent’s wobbling.
It’s how you respond to being punched in the mouth.
Three nights ago, the stinging shot came — a drubbing in the Panthers’ barn, a series lead evaporated, nail-biters traded for a stymying shutout that cast a shadow over the whole thing. And then came Game 5, offering the Maple Leafs a chance to dust themselves off, to shrug off the counter and prove they can still hang.
Instead, Wednesday night, under the glare of the Scotiabank Arena lights, Toronto stepped into the ring, squared up, and took another one in the chops.
“The first period, they out-skated us. They had the puck, won the races. We just played slow,” head coach Craig Berube said after the dust had settled on what wound up a 6-1 Panthers rout. “They were fast, they were on us, they were hungrier.”
It was sunk from the very beginning, in Berube’s eyes, that disappointing start handcuffing the Maple Leafs — and spurring on the veteran Cats — before the blue-and-white had a chance to dig out any kind of positive moment for themselves.
“It’s hard to explain it. We’ve all got to be better, myself included. You can’t start the game that way,” Berube continued. “That’s a big thing for me. It sets the tone for the game.”
There was no question, for anyone in the building, that the night started off-kilter.
From the jump, the signs were there — bobbled pucks, whiffed shot attempts. The home side looked nervy, tense, making the type of unforced errors they’d seemed to have gotten out of their game earlier this season. It was in the opening minutes, when Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Bennett took turns teeing off on Joseph Woll from the slot, that the worry began, that those in the building started shifting in their seats.
William Nylander — the only skater in a Maple Leaf sweater who showed glimpses of elite ability in this one — nearly wrestled the thing back with a dangerous look of his own, forcing a Panthers turnover at Toronto’s blue line and flying down the ice on a promising breakaway attempt. But Sergei Bobrovsky swatted the chance aside.
Then came another Cats look, this time off a bad Leafs change. Then a handful more, after some messy, disorganized play in Toronto’s zone, the flurry requiring Woll’s best.
And then an Auston Matthews misplay — a spinning pass attempt from the corner, deep in Toronto’s zone, that turned the puck over to Florida’s forecheckers — spiralled into an Aaron Ekblad wrister that floated over Woll’s shoulder.
Said Panthers head coach Paul Maurice of that opening goal, which swung the opening chaos in his club’s direction: “It felt important.”
“Obviously the start wasn’t great,” Matthews said late Wednesday night. “The way that they play, I think we just fed into what makes them successful. I mean, they won the netfronts tonight, I thought they competed harder, won more puck battles. … We didn’t take care of pucks, we turned it over a lot, especially in the neutral zone.
“I think that’s the game, it’s really as simple as that. Just little details. I don’t think we were very sharp tonight.”
“Some sloppy play, not hard enough working, giving away too many opportunities around our net,” added Mitch Marner, on where it all went wrong for Toronto early in this one. “There’s a good list of it.”
For those who’ve seen this movie before, it wasn’t a shocking plot twist as much as a disappointing rerun. It’s far from the first time these Maple Leafs have been sunk by a lacklustre start, that they’ve found their game too long after the thing’s already been wrestled away from them. Rewind back to mid-March, after a disappointing loss to their provincial rivals, and Berube had found himself flustered by the same thing.
“You have to hold your players accountable to it, and they have to hold themselves accountable to it,” he’d said then. “They need to make their mind up in the room on the importance of the start of the game. And on 60 minutes, of urgency, details, doing things right and playing our game.”
Two months later, to the day, the coach was delivering the same message, minutes after the buzzer sounded on one of the most important losses of his club’s season.
“There were a lot of mistakes. For me, mistakes happen in games, but it’s the way they happened tonight that’s disappointing, more than anything,” Berube said Wednesday. “We’ll be better next game, but it’s just disappointing for all of us here, the way we came out in the first period and the way we played. That’s the biggest thing I take out of the whole game.”
It didn’t get much better after that stumbling start. While Nylander spurred another chance late in the first, and came out with some meaningful jump in the second, it took only minutes in the middle frame for the Maple Leafs to find themselves hemmed in their own zone once again, hanging on amid the barrage.
Another disorganized defensive-zone shift turned into a Dmitry Kulikov tally to double the Cats’ lead. Four minutes later, a spinning no-look pass from Marner sent the puck straight to a waiting Panther — seconds after that, it was behind Woll again. Another four minutes, and it was 4-0 Cats, a rare Chris Tanev miscue setting the table for another tally from Florida’s blue-liners.
Then the jeers came, boos raining down on the home side, the game seemingly all but over with more than a period left to go. By the time the final buzzer did come, the majority of the Scotiabank Arena crowd had already filtered out of the arena. But not before a No. 34 jersey was tossed onto the ice in frustration.
“I mean, I don’t think we gave them much reason to stick around,” Matthews said of the early exit.
Two nights from now, the pair will return to the sheet in Sunrise. The page will be turned, the slate wiped clean as it can be in 48 hours. But regardless of how it all goes — whether the club’s highest-paid game-breakers actually break open a game, whether their grizzled blue line puts their veteran savvy on display — there’s a familiar thorn still stuck in this club’s side.
Another example, piled on all the others, that this group is missing some part of the equation that results in rising to the moment.
“We’ve responded in the past, and I expect a response from our team. We’ll look and we’ll talk about things, make some adjustments that are needed. But it’s more of a mindset for me going into this Game 6 than anything else,” Berube said. “It’s not X’s and O’s. We know what they’re doing. And they played a simple game tonight — they were excellent.
“I don’t think they came any harder than they have, to be honest with you — I think we let them come tonight. We stood around and watched.”
If there’s anything to be taken from the club that just ran them out of their own building, it’s the blueprint for how to approach this next stretch, this most crucial juncture, where the stakes peak. How to handle the emotional tumult that comes with this territory, when you’ve given everyone every reason to doubt you.
For the defending champs, it’s a simple formula, one that applies even after a night like this one: Belief and consistency.
“I am absolutely not a believer in momentum,” Maurice said Wednesday night, after his club reeled off its third straight victory. “We leave the game here, and we’re going to have a certain kind of day tomorrow that we’ve had a bunch of times.
“It won’t be a happier day, or a better day than other days. It’s going to be exactly the same.”
