SIMMONS: Why don't Matthews and Marner have more Wendel and Gilmour in them?

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Wendel Clark doesn’t really know how to explain it.

How he elevated his game at playoff time.

How his crazy intensity of regular-season hockey turned up more than a notch when the Stanley Cup playoffs began in Toronto.

As a teenaged rookie, Clark scored five goals in his first 10 Stanley Cup games. He followed that up with six in his second season. In between all that, he was hitting and fighting and doing all the Wendel things that made him so beloved in Toronto.

In the two magical Maple Leafs seasons still remembered so fondly, Clark scored 19 playoff goals in 39 games in 1993 and 1994, while smashing into anything around him and spending 75 minutes in the penalty box.

If only there was some Wendel Clark in Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. If only those two Maple Leafs giants — in salary and regular-season numbers — had some of the qualities that made Wendel Clark, Wendel Clark.

Clark was built to play against — or for — the Florida Panthers. He was a more-dynamic Matthew Tkachuk, with a Matthews-Sam Reinhart kind of wrist shot and a body needing to engage in collision. He would have been the perfect Craig Berube player.

He wasn’t the only Maple Leaf to grow come playoff time. Probably no one in Leafs history did it better than the rather tiny man himself, Doug Gilmour.

In the years in which Clark scored 19 goals, Gilmour had the two greatest individual playoff seasons in Leafs history. He had 63 points in 39 games in ’93 and ’94. No one will ever come close to that again.

And in doing so, Gilmour, more playmaker than the goal scorer and once traded for Berube, wound up with 16 post-season goals over those two years. Before that, he had scored 11 for the Flames in the only season Calgary won the Stanley Cup and he scored nine for St. Louis and led the playoffs in points without making it to the final with the Blues.

Gilmour never has completely been able to unpack what it was about him that made him so special in the biggest moments and the largest games. But he had it. In Toronto, in St. Louis, in Calgary, in Montreal — pretty much everywhere he played.

The playoff lights came on and most nights no one shone brighter than Gilmour.

If there was an answer for Matthews and Marner, with reasonable point totals this playoff season but not a reasonable amount of goals scored,  Clark and GIlmour happily would supply the information.

But they can’t make someone in their image. They can’t make Matthews mean the way Clark played with anger. It isn’t in him.

And they can’t turn the better comparable of Marner, the ultimate playmaker, into Gilmour, the ultimate playmaker. It looked like it was there for Marner when he scored giant playoff points — 44 in 18 games — when playing junior for the London Knights.

His whole game is measured statistically and always will be. Not known for his goal scoring, Marner has scored at 16-goal pace in the post-season after scoring at 21-goal pace in the regular season.

That’s a drop of more than 20% from regular season to playoffs for Marner.

Marner has averaged the fabulous total of 92 points per season playing for the Leafs. His playoff totals to date have him at an average rate of 75 points as a post-season scorer.

That’s a drop of 23% on point totals.

It’s not much different for Matthews, the goal scorer nonpareil until the playoffs begin. He has averaged 52 goals per season in his nine-year career. Those are incredible numbers.

At playoff time, though, he averages 31.5 goals. In his past 20 playoff games, nine of them against the Panthers, he has just three goals.

The goal scoring drop from regular season to playoffs is 39%. If he was a stock, we would have sold long ago.

The Maple Leafs need 5-on-5 offence from Matthews and Marner in order to eliminate the Panthers in Round 2 of the playoffs. The only way they can win this series, really, is at even strength.

The Panthers penalty killing is so strong and aggressive, and Sergei Bobrovsky is now so sharp that the Leafs can’t rely on their struggling power play to push the team to the next round.

It has to come at 5-on-5.

Marner has just six even-strength points in 10 playoff games this year. Matthews has seven, only one of them being a goal. Should those numbers continue, the Leafs will have great difficulty winning two of the next three games.

William Nylander and Matthews Knies have done their part through two rounds of the playoffs, producing when necessary. The captain and the new father, though, need to be a lot better and a whole lot more engaged.

There is a history here they may not know about, being as young and as privileged as they are. They probably don’t know that Darryl Sittler scored at 37-goal pace in his time in Toronto and 32-goal pace come playoff time. That’s what’s supposed to happen to great players on the Leafs.

Sittler’s great winger, Lanny McDonald — Sittler as Matthews to McDonald’s Marner — scored at 36-goal pace in playoff years for the Leafs at a time when he was scoring at 38-goal pace himself during regular seasons.

Sittler once had a five-goal playoff game. McDonald scored a series-winning overtime goal. Clark had horns honking all over the city. Gilmour became an all-time Toronto sports figure to never be forgotten.

What now for Matthews and Marner, who have combined to score one goal in this series?

What now with this rich opportunity still alive for the most qualified Leafs team in years?

Will Matthews and Marner be the reason the Leafs win the series — they can still be difference makers — or the reason they lose it?

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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