Maple Leafs search for answers in aftermath of Game 5 meltdown
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Hit the reset button, the Maple Leafs say.
If you’re a card-carrying member of Leafs nation, do you bother reaching for a panic button? You’ve seen this enough in the Stanley Cup playoffs in the past several years to have a fairly good idea it’s going to happen.
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Maple Leafs search for answers in aftermath of Game 5 meltdown Back to video
What went down in the Leafs’ 6-1 loss to the Florida Panthers in Game 5 at Scotiabank Arena was different, to a degree.
The Leafs on Wednesday night reached disorganized depths not often seen in the first year with Craig Berube as coach. These bad efforts, though, clearly still linger in their system.
The Leafs have lost three consecutive games in the best-of-seven second-round series after taking a 2-0 lead. At no time during the regular season did the Leafs lose four games in a row.
Our takeaways from the loss that has pushed the Leafs to the brink going into a must-win Game 6 on Friday in Sunrise:
TANEV STANDS UP
During his post-game availability, Berube spoke about the team’s mental state going into Game 6.
“I don’t think they came any harder than they have,” Berube said. “I think we let them come. We stood around and watched, you can’t do that. We’ve responded in the past and I expect a response from our team. We’ll talk about things and make some adjustments that are needed.
“But it’s more of a mindset for me going into this Game 6 than anything else. It’s not Xs and Os. We know what they’re doing. They played a simple game and they were excellent at it. They did exactly what they needed to do. Up to this point, it has been a good series. It was a tough game.”
As for the Leafs’ mindset, the tendency of the star players after losses such as this one is to speak in generalities when taking responsibility is on the table.
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We asked captain Auston Matthews after the game how much he puts on his own shoulders going into Friday. He hasn’t scored a goal in the series and has just two in 11 playoff games.
“I think everybody has to look in the mirror, myself included,” Matthews said. “Everybody wants to be better. Everybody wants to obviously win. We’ve been a great road team all season long. There’s always going to be a belief in this group and the confidence in this group from what we built off throughout the year. We have to go into this game with confidence, and it has to be our best game of the year.”
There wasn’t much anger. You would think there would be some after an effort such as that, but there wasn’t.
Of the four Leafs players who spoke to media after the game — Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and Chris Tanev — it was only the latter who fell on his own sword.
“I’ll take responsibility,” Tanev said in answering a question that was not about his individual play.
“I need to be better, so if I’m a minus player (he was minus-2) probably not going to win the game. It’s on me. I’ll take responsibility for the game.”
The Leafs, in the Matthews/Marner/Nylander era, haven’t had many players who speak as honestly as Tanev does. Perhaps the lack of public introspection is one reason why the club continuously finds itself in these post-season situations, where the opposing club always manages to find a way.
BIG BUCKS, BIG ZEROES
We can’t say this enough: If you’re part of the group pulling in the biggest salaries on the team, you have to expect you’re being looked upon to tilt the series in your team’s favour.
Certainly, that’s how the public views it.
Matthews shrugged off a question about being frustrated during his dry spell.
“I don’t look at myself as a one-dimensional player,” Matthews said. “If I’m not scoring, I’m trying to do all the other little things that make the team successful, to make myself successful, and just try to be an all-around complete player.
“I’m going to continue to push and try to score and keep shooting, but all the other little details of my game, I want to do at a high level as well.”
Of course that should be the goal. And no one who watches the Leafs with any regularity would say Matthews is a one-dimensional player.
None of his six shots on goal on Wednesday — tied with Nylander for the most among Leafs — made an impact on the scoresheet.
Is each inch of ice gained only after a tough battle? Are goals hard to come by? Yes and yes. But remember that no less than four Panthers, including forwards Jesper Boqvist and A.J. Greer and defencemen Dmitry Kulikov and Niko Mikkola, scored for the first time in the playoffs in Game 5.
The Leafs’ top line of Matthews between Marner and Matthew Knies has had a difficulty gaining traction as the series has progressed, whether it has been against the Aleksander Barkov line (as it was on Wednesday) or the Anton Lundell trio.
Don’t forget the Leafs were shut out in Game 4, and came within 66 seconds of being shut out again when Nick Robertson scored.
The Leafs haven’t been shut out in consecutive playoff games since the 1994 Western Conference final when the Vancouver Canucks blanked them in Games 3 and 4.
“They’re going against the Barkov line for the most part,” Berube said of the Matthews group. “If you look at the matchup throughout the series, it’s pretty tight, and there’s not going to be a lot of room.
“They’ve done a good job until tonight of doing a good job against that line, and that’s part of their job.
“Our top guys, we need them to produce. But they’ve done a lot of good things up to this point. Tonight wasn’t a good game for anybody, all of us.”
RESET, RINSE AND REPEAT
Are the Leafs capable of forgetting Game 5 and playing well enough in Game 6 to win, which would set up Game 7 in Toronto on Sunday?
Why would the defending Cup champion Panthers approach the game any differently and take anything off when they can advance to the conference final?
Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long to have the answers.
“You go home,” Marner said. “You realize that wasn’t close to good enough. You flush it down the toilet.
“Everyone has their own way of coping with things and forgetting about things. Whatever yours is, just go home, do it. Do what you need to do to your body to recover. Get ready for a hard game.”
Marner, by the way, said he gave no thought to the idea that Game 5 might have been his last home game with the Leafs, considering his looming free agency.
“It’s not the spot that we want to be in, but you can’t do anything about it,” Marner said. “We knew this was going to be a roller coaster of a ride.”
Said Matthews: “We have to win a game to keep our season alive. We’ve been able to push back, and we’ve been able to bounce back all year, and it’s no different than now.”
Bouncing back to win a game in November or January is one thing. To do so against a team as playoff-hardened as the Panthers in May, that’s something else entirely.
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