TORONTO — On the morning of the first day of the Toronto Maple Leafs' supposed redemption journey, hours before they stepped into Game 1 of their first-round reboot against the Tampa Bay Lightning, bearing the weight of historic woes, haunted by last year’s failure, the question was put to them:
What can these Leafs learn from the bitter ending they endured 11 months ago, as they prepare to face the very same opponent?
“I think we just know that it’s playoff hockey. ... The margin for error’s pretty slim,” Leafs defenceman Justin Holl had said. “A bounce here, a penalty there, is oftentimes the difference in these games. We’re going to have to be really focused on our details.”
Tuesday night at Scotiabank Arena, under the anxious eyes of a roller-coaster crowd that booed him, cheered him and headed for the exits early, the oft-maligned defender’s words proved prophetic.
A minute in, a bounce off Corey Perry’s skate as Zach Aston-Reese tried to carry the puck out of his own zone created a mishap that enabled Perry to wheel back into the corner, around the net, and ultimately sow enough chaos that Toronto found itself down 1-0 before they’d caught their breath.
Not long after, a penalty, courtesy of another piece of crafty work by Perry, was killed off by the Maple Leafs. But then another, in the final minute of the opening frame, this one capitalized on, pushing Toronto further back on its heels.
For half of this night, it seemed that margin for error was as slim as expected, both teams getting hauled to the box, both teams putting numbers on the board with their star-studded power-play corps.
Then Michael Bunting blew that margin wide open.
Late in the second period, with his Maple Leafs having clawed back but still trailing 4-2, the winger let loose an ill-fated elbow at the head of Erik Cernak, sending the Bolts defender to the ice in pain. Amid a tirade unleashed on his way to the box, in the box and across the ice as he was sent down the tunnel, Bunting was tagged with a five-minute major and tossed from the game. He will have a hearing on Wednesday.
The Lightning scored twice on the ensuing power play, burying Toronto’s comeback attempt just as it found its legs.
“Obviously, we have to make some adjustments,” Leafs forward Ryan O’Reilly said of his club after the final buzzer sounded on the eventual 7-3 pummelling. “They outplayed us tonight. They deserved that win. We have to stay out of the box more — their power play’s so good, so lethal. It just gets their best players feeling the puck and on the board.”
His captain echoed the sentiment.
”There’s a lot of emotion, a lot of momentum swings in playoff hockey. Obviously, we have to be more disciplined in our game,” Leafs captain John Tavares said of where it all unravelled. “You know, those calls that are borderline, more likely than not are probably going to go their way. They’ve been in the finals three times in a row. We have to be just extremely disciplined, staying out of the box, play hard and understand the line you can’t cross.”
For a time, before Bunting’s lapse in judgment, it seemed like his club had found the path back to even ground.
Down 3-0 after 20 minutes, the Maple Leafs came out in the second period a team grasping for something to hold onto, ready to climb back into it. The weight of that slim margin started to turn against Tampa Bay, Cernak and Bunting’s first dust-up sending the Bolts defender to the box. A silky power-play sequence from Mitch Marner, Tavares and O’Reilly got Toronto on the board, and showed that they had it in them to chip away at the thing.
A few minutes later, there they were again, William Nylander walking to the point, staring down Andrei Vasilevskiy, and simply firing one through the mess of bodies and into the back of the net. 3-0 became 3-2. The momentum was building.
Until a bounce here. A penalty there.
“We kind of crawled back in there for a bit. A couple little things didn’t go our way, and then, you know, we’re in a hole,” O’Reilly said. “It is what it is.”
Asked post-game what he thought of his polarizing winger sinking his club’s Game 1 chances as they started to find life, Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe chose to give Bunting the benefit of the doubt.
“In terms of the call, I don’t have a lot of thoughts on that. But Bunts, to me, is trying to win a line to set himself up to win a race for the puck,” the coach said. “It got away on him. The guy wasn’t expecting it. I’m sure Bunts was expecting a battle in that situation, and he didn’t get one.”
Intent aside, the end result was a gift-wrapped opportunity to turn a 4-2 battle into a 6-2 drubbing, before each side added one for fun in the final period. And for the Maple Leafs faithful, it was also a reminder of the sinking feeling they’ve been given by this club, at this time of year, too many times before.
Slow starts, costly mistakes, opportunities slipping through their fingers. A bit of hope, and then a gut punch.
Rewind to last year’s meeting between these teams, and the script was flipped, the Maple Leafs dominating Game 1 before the Bolts answered two days later. To a man, from the players on both sides of the battle to both coaches, too, the unpredictability of the road ahead was made clear. A Game 1 win counts only as much as a quarter of the series’ ultimate goal, and these Leafs could very well come out flying two nights from now, could finish the comeback they started.
Tugging at the sleeves of that potential turnaround, though, is the familiarity that seemed to seep into the key moments of this opening stumble. Signs of progress undone by ill-timed penalties and baffling mistakes.
Nine hours earlier, when this latest post-season journey was still mostly hypotheticals, there was one other question put to Holl: Is this Maple Leafs team different from the one that came up short last time these two teams met in the Stanley Cup Playoffs? Is it different from the ones that came before, and did the same?
“I guess we’ll find out,” he’d said.
With one game down, that all-important question remains unanswered. They’ll get their next chance Thursday.
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