Maple Leafs are in good position with Panthers despite back-to-back losses

It probably doesn’t feel like it, but the Toronto Maple Leafs are in a good position heading back home for Game 5 against the Florida Panthers on Wednesday.

The Leafs beat the Panthers 5-4 in Game 1 and 4-3 in Game 2, before dropping Game 3 5-4 in overtime and Game 4 by a score of 2-0. The back-to-back road losses are especially painful if you’re a Leafs fan, because winning just one of those games would have sent them back home with a chance to take the series at home and advance to the Conference Final for the first time in over 20 years. Instead, they face what’s now a best-of-two series against their familiar playoff foes. And despite the bitter feeling after watching them get shut out and play the worst game of their playoff run so far, and the contempt for letting the Panthers back into the series, the Leafs are in a good place right now.

Is it the perfect place? No. It would have been eons better for the sake of the fanbase’s mental health to sweep the Panthers, or even just simply take one of those two road games, so you have three kicks at the can to clinch the series starting on Wednesday night. But here’s a reality check. It’s the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and rarely does anything come that easily, let alone against a team that won a Cup just 11 months ago.

As somebody who’s been writing about the Leafs for the better part of the past ten years, and someone who’s been watching them religiously since the mid-2000s, I can’t fault any Leafs fan for letting the demons seep in. We’ve seen this team find a way to lose important games in a multitude of ways, whether against teams they’re worse than, or they’re better than, whether it’s in a Game 7 or a Game 5. All it takes is one poor effort, like we saw in Game 4 on Sunday night, to propel parts of the fanbase back into a state of emergency.

But if we’re being completely honest here, and call it a loser’s mentality if you want, the Leafs are fine where they are in the series at the moment.

I get it. Considering this is the ninth kick at the can for this core in the playoffs, the expectations have shot through the roof. It feels like anything less than a Stanley Cup is a failure for this team, and you can make that argument for any team in any position. But it’s important to remember just how much of a grind the Stanley Cup Playoffs are. Every team is in do-or-die mode, and nobody knows this better than the Panthers, who have been the NHL’s toughest out ever since they just barely made the playoffs back in 2022-23 and turned it into a run to the Cup final.

Sure, it would have been nice to see the Leafs snatch their momentum in a bottle and use it to take down the Panthers in four or five games, but that simply wasn’t a realistic expectation. If you picked the Leafs to win this series, I’m willing to bet you had them winning in seven games, or even six. The last time the Panthers lost a series was the 2022-23 Cup final, when the Vegas Golden Knights defeated them in five games. Since then, they’ve been on a tear and have won their last five playoff series in 5, 6, 6, 7, and 5 games, respectively. To expect a team like the Maple Leafs, who have a tidal wave of doom and gloom come over them from the media and parts of the fanbase whenever quite literally anything goes wrong, to come in and make quick work of the Panthers in the second round was a recipe for disappointment if that’s what your expectation was.

I’m not defending the Leafs’ play in their past two games. You want Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner to have more than two goals apiece, you want Joseph Woll to be free of any stinkers like he was in Game 4, and you want the depth scoring to chip in the same way it has for the Panthers so far. But if anything, it should be taken as a good sign that it took Florida until Game 4 to handily win a game against them.

If the Leafs go into Game 5 and lay another egg, I’ll be far more welcoming to takes about how this team isn’t good enough and how they’re doomed against the Panthers, but as the age-old saying goes, it ain’t over till it’s over. They have a chance on Wednesday to pull ahead in the series at home in front of their fans, and should that happen, you can expect Game 6 in Florida and a potential Game 7 back home to be the hardest games this team has played this season. And that’s what you have to expect when you’re in the playoffs.