Knee Jerk Reaction: Maple Leafs blow crucial opportunity to gain ground on Panthers, Lightning

There’s a certain type of dread that exists when you regularly watch the Toronto Maple Leafs that specifically occurs when things are going too well. The Leafs had won three straight games heading into Saturday night’s game against the struggling Nashville Predators, and with the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers both losing games earlier in the day, they had a clear opportunity to gain a crucial two points and pull into first in the Atlantic.

They carried the good times from the week that was into the first period of the game, jumping out to a 2-0 lead thanks to goals from John Tavares and Mitch Marner. Then, as it’s gone so many times in the past, things went downhill.

Matthew Knies took a penalty at the final buzzer of the first period, to which the Predators capitalized and cut the deficit in half. OK, bad luck, but it happens. Squash the momentum while it’s still small and keep putting pucks on net. Instead, they let the momentum slowly bubble, and the result after 40 minutes was a 3-2 deficit to Nashville thanks to a Kieffer Bellows snipe that Joseph Woll probably should have had, followed by a defensive breakdown in the last minute of the frame leading to a Filip Forsberg go-ahead goal.

The Leafs didn’t play the worst period in the world. In the end, they lost the period 1-0, two if you count the empty-net goal. But it doesn’t matter. If you mail it in the way they did in the second period, you can’t respond with anything but a 110% effort to gain any credit back. They didn’t hound Saros with shots, they didn’t capitalize on their power play opportunity, and they took stupid, timely penalties, wasting valuable minutes to try and spark a comeback.

It’s simply not a good enough effort from a team looking to prove to the world that they aren’t playoff odds. You have games like the ones this week where you think they’ve started to buy in to the “every game is a playoff game” mentality, and then you have games like tonight where you find yourself wondering if the team will ever truly understand the gravity of these moments and capitalize on opportunities to set themselves up for success.

Good teams lose to bad teams. It happens. But there’s just no way to justify a performance like that against a team that had three goals in their past four games before this game. You need better from everybody involved, and the Leafs didn’t deliver.