The Toronto Maple Leafs were a very good team last season. They won the Atlantic Division and they had the fourth-best record in the NHL at 52-26-4, but as we all know, the regular season is just an 82-game marathon to win entry into the playoffs, where teams have to endure two months of torture to earn the ultimate prize. That is where success and failure are determined.
The team that eliminated the Leafs in seven games, the Florida Panthers, won their second straight Stanley Cup on Tuesday with a 5-1 victory over the Edmonton Oilers. Some commentators and online geniuses said afterward that because Toronto took the Panthers to a seventh and deciding game, they were this close to eliminating Florida and could have been the team skating around the ice with the Cup.
This was either a bit of trolling or the most laughable attempt of revisionist history in recent memory. The Leafs did have a 2-0 lead over the Panthers and did lead 3-1 in the second period of Game 3, but then the Panthers woke up like the Undertaker in a WWE match and erased the Leafs lead in less than three minutes, took the lead late in the second, and after Toronto tied the game in the third, Brad Marchand did what Brad Marchand always does…..kill the Leafs. That was Toronto’s great opportunity. After getting off the mat, Florida won four of the next five games, and the only win the Leafs earned was a near-perfect road performance in Game 6.
When it came down to crunch time in the most critical points of the series in Game 5 and Game 7, the Leafs were woeful, could not shake off their choke artist reputation, and were outscored 12-2 on home ice, so in spite of the series going to seven games and Toronto notching three of the seven games that Florida lost in the playoffs, it takes four to win a series and the Leafs were not close.
Because the Panthers are in the same division, Leafs GM Brad Treliving will have to figure out a way to get past or be better than Florida to attain the ultimate prize, something that will not be easily achievable. The problem with that is that no one wants to leave the Sunshine State. It is the home of four of the last six Cup winners, the weather is warm year-round, and in spite of the protestations of Commissioner Gary Bettman, the fact that Florida (and other southern US states) have no state income taxes, players are willing to take less there than in other places.
The way that Treliving may take for the second year in a row is the ‘if you can’t beat’em, join’em’ approach. Last summer, the Leafs signed three Panthers in Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Steven Lorentz, and Anthony Stolarz. All who achieved varying levels of success. There are still some questions of whether Sam Bennett will reach July 1 or if Panthers GM Bill Zito will lock him up on an eight-year max deal, as he has Sam Reinhart, Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, and Gustav Forsling. If he reaches the open market, it is likely that the Leafs will check in with agent Darren Ferris on Bennett, but it may cost them most of the cap space that will be vacated by Ferris’s other big free agent, Mitch Marner.
Aaron Ekblad doesn’t seem to fit into a Toronto scenario since they have seven defensemen on long-term deals, and while it is hard to imagine Brad Marchand in a Leafs uniform, the way the 37-year-old played in the postseason has to have NHL GMs, including Trelivin,g salivating.
The Leafs were good, but they were not Florida Panthers good. No one was, and if they hope to win a Stanley Cup, they will have to find a way to be that good.
