Game 7 ends in familiar tragedy for Leafs

This isn’t the most formal way to start this article, but what else can I do or say? All I can do, all we can do as Leafs fans, is laugh and pretend like this team’s way of losing in the most pitiful manner doesn’t hurt us anymore… even though it does.

Here I am at 1:00 AM at my desk, after bussing home from Toronto back to Waterloo, staring at a blank Word document, trying my very best to put my thoughts and feelings from tonight’s game on paper.

All that can come to mind? “Why am I even surprised?” In my article ahead of Game 7, I raised a few questions.

“There are still enough pages left in this book for these four to change the path of this story…

Can this team find within themselves one more game? One more complete effort like Game 6?”

I can’t answer those questions… the only ones who can are in the dressing room.

The dressing room answered loud and clear. They couldn’t.

The game looked doomed from the start

The moment the game started, this feeling of impending doom slowly started to grow, and grow and grow. Perhaps it was the trauma of this team’s prior Game 7 showings, but the lethargic way the Toronto Maple Leafs started the game was appalling.

The Florida Panthers had more jump from the get-go and hemmed Toronto in their end ruthlessly. When I saw Morgan Rielly serve up a pizza to Aleksander Barkov along the boards with miles of open ice in front of him to skate into instead, I knew I was in for a long night.

The Leafs showed some semblance of a pushback to end the first after Florida caved them in for the first 10 minutes of the period. Scott Laughton and Steven Lorentz had separate breakaways that were both foiled by Sergei Bobrovsky, and I thought that first period was the best period of hockey Max Domi played all year.

In a game where Scott Laughton, Steven Lorentz, Calle Jarnkrok, Max Domi, and Bobby McMann were on for zero goals against, you’d expect it to be a tight game. Five-sixths of Toronto’s bottom-six to start the game ended Game seven with an even net-zero for goals for vs goals against. As a Leafs fan, you take that 10/10 times.

In fact, Toronto’s best line tonight per Natural Stat Trick was the Leafs’ third line of Lorentz–Laughton–Jarnkrok, who boasted an xGF of 96.24% in their 9:00 of even-strength ice time.

The game was lost in six minutes

In a winner-takes-all Game 7, Max Domi was the lone Leafs goal scorer with an assist from Bobby McMann. Matthew Knies didn’t look right all game, and while they played fine, the Matthews–Marner duo was unable to find the back of the net.

The first goal

Morgan Rielly has an absolute stinker on Florida’s first goal. My biggest criticism of him in my last article was his penchant to pinch up on a play when he just doesn’t need to.

Here, a Brandon Carlo shot goes off Knies into the corner, where Barkov retrieves it. Barkov makes a quick up the boards to Evan Rodrigues, and Rielly makes a weak effort at a pinch. He doesn’t make the play harder on the Florida forward, nor is he able to disrupt him in any meaningful way.

Rodrigues makes a quick short-area pass to Seth Jones, who takes it in on a two-on-one with Sam Reinhart against Carlo. Carlo takes the pass away and trusts his goalie to take the shot. Jones places a perfect one past Joseph Woll to open the scoring.

The second goal

Just minutes later, the John Tavares line is being hemmed in by Florida’s scary third line. Jake McCabe and Carlo can’t get the puck off Anton Lundell behind the net; it gets rimmed around to Nate Schmidt.

Carlo has Eetu Luostarinen tied up in the net front, and McCabe is covering Lundell up to the high slot. The Leafs have perfectly fine man-on-man coverage at this point.

Brad Marchand whips a puck on net from the half wall. Woll makes the save, but McCabe gets disconnected from Lundell with the net front traffic, and he taps in the rebound, 2–0 Panthers.

The third goal

The Tavares–Nylander duo hasn’t looked good since Game 3 of this series, and they continued an absolute horrid stretch again tonight in the biggest game of the season.

Craig Berube has tried his best to get Tavares away from the Lundell line and to get some shifts against Florida’s fourth line on home ice. Nine minutes into the second period, with Toronto looking for a goal to stem the Panthers’ momentum, Berube gets the match-up he’s looking for.

On this play, Tavares is trying to break it out, facing back pressure from A.J. Greer and incoming pressure from Jonah Gadjovich.

He tries to make a bounce pass off the board to William Nylander, but it’s a badly placed pass, and Nylander doesn’t do a good job boxing Jones out, and it gets turned over the other way. Carlo comes across to cut off Seth Jones, who’s driving down the left boards with Greer trailing in support.

For some inexplicable reason, Morgan Rielly chooses to drift towards the trailing Greer instead of Gadjovich, who’s driving the net. He ends up covering neither player as Greer receives the drop pass from Jones. Woll makes the initial save on Greer, but with Rielly floundering in the middle of no man’s land, Gadjovich is all alone to put the Greer pass home off the rebound.

Toronto is down 3–0 in a matter of minutes, and two of the goals are the direct fault of the Leafs’ second-line centre and highest-paid defenceman.

The balance of the game was lost on those three shifts, and the rest of their star forwards were unable to solve Sergei Bobrovsky to bridge the difference.

Between Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, and Nylander, the Leafs had two high-danger scoring chances tonight. It just wasn’t good enough.

End of an era

It was a lousy effort from John Tavares and Morgan Rielly in the first half of the second period. With Tavares and Marner headed towards unrestricted free agency, and uninspiring performances from both players this series, it does feel like the Maple Leafs are headed to a crossroads.

Florida showed championship pedigree tonight and won a game that needed to be won.

Toronto’s stars showed once again that when the lights are brightest, they do not have it in them to rise to the challenge.

Before tonight’s game, there were still pages left to be written for this group of players. I pondered which path they would choose. The Leafs’ Core Four went down the second path, the one the fanbase hoped and prayed was not the path they would take.

“…a silent chill, a rattle of the bones, as an era of Leafs hockey comes to a shuttered close. A story that leads its readers to wonder… what if?”

What if indeed.