Maple Leafs left too much for luck to decide amid missed calls, chances

TORONTO — In one agonizing moment from the tumultuous, run-killing, potentially franchise-altering Game 5 that ended the Toronto Maple Leafs' season on Friday night, you could feel the entirety of their second-round woes bubbling up and spilling over.

Maybe the puck crossed the line. Maybe there was no whistle. Or maybe the play was dead.

Either way, as the minutes waned on the second period of this team’s final game, as Morgan Rielly tore through the netfront and appeared to stuff the tying goal past Sergei Bobrovsky’s pad, a familiar sinking feeling seemed to boil in the pits of the stomachs of the anxious fans packing the Scotiabank Arena stands.

Instead of a goal horn, they got a solemn huddle of the officials, a lengthy high-stakes review, an equalizer nullified. Bottles and towels and profanities rained down. And in their trajectory, in their explosive, mess-making landings on the ice, you could understand the sentiment plenty: “We’ve been robbed.”

Though the ones watching from the bench didn’t let the moment sink them, the Maple Leafs managing to come up with another tying goal a period later, a last gasp before eventually falling in overtime, they wore on their faces a similar feeling post-game.

“I thought it was in,” Maple Leafs captain John Tavares said of the sequence after the final buzzer had sounded on a series-clinching 3-2 Florida Panthers win. “I mean, I was heading to the net, I was right there — from my vantage point, I thought it was in. Obviously, they looked at it and had their reasoning that they explained. It just didn’t go our way.”

“I don’t know,” a dejected Auston Matthews added later, shaking his head as he revisited the play and all that happened next. “It looked like a good goal. But I don’t know. It’s their decision.”

“The explanation I got was that there wasn’t a clear and conclusive view of the initial shot, that it was in,” Maple Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe later explained from the podium. “So there’s that. And the other shot, of the puck in the net, they said was after the play, and play was dead.”

In a way, that pivotal moment seemed the culmination of what’s plagued these Maple Leafs for the past 10 days. Take them at their word, and you’d believe they were right there. That it was just a matter of a few pucks, bouncing just a few inches left or right, rolling just a bit further over the line, that swung this series out of their grasp and into Florida’s. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s just the cruelty of the game, the way you can be burned when you must try to wrangle and control something so frenetic, chaotic and uncontrollable.

But in the end, it wasn’t the puck luck turning on them that did these Leafs in, it wasn’t heaps of misfortune that followed them through five games, despite their best efforts — it was that they left too much up for luck to decide.

“I thought we played well enough to win here today,” Keefe said of his Leafs post-game.

It’s a belief these Leafs have clung to wholeheartedly over the course of this series.

“I felt like we had enough offence and enough chances to get us back in the game,” Matthews had said after his team’s last loss in this rink, in Game 2.

“I thought we had a ton of really good looks, moved the puck very well,” Keefe had said a couple nights earlier, after Game 1, this series’ first stumble.

Go back even further, before the first-round triumph, before the nervy regular season, to the Game 7 heartbreak a year ago that sent them into a similar handshake line. It was a similar refrain then, too.

“We had looks. We had chances,” Marner had said that night in 2022. “It didn’t go in.”

Friday night at Scotiabank Arena, with everything on the line once again, the Maple Leafs had their looks, and had their chances. It simply wasn’t enough to slow these Panthers down.

There’s a sports cliche for every type of way a season ends. For the 2023 Leafs, there’s this one: “It’s the hope that kills you.” In their case, it was the hope that if they simply kept getting their looks, getting their chances, if they just kept doing what they were doing, the same way, it would all fall their way eventually.

“We were in positions to win in Games 1, 2 and 3, and didn’t handle that well. So that stings,” Keefe said after the dust had settled on the series, looking back on where it first went sideways. “But I love how our team didn’t lay down. In fact, the opposite of that in Game 4. Our team really pulled together, and to me that was incredible progress, for our group, in that moment.

“And tonight, to me, you know, you want a bounce to go your way, you want to bear down and finish some of your chances. But I thought our team left it all out there tonight.”

Whether that was problem, that this was simply all these Leafs had — enough chances to get close, but not quite over the line — time will tell. But down the hall, where the music blared and the hollers of a winning locker room echoed through the bowels of Scotiabank Arena, the leader of the winning side had a clearer view of the value of all those promising chances.

“I think that there’s a lot of individual skill over there, probably the most in the league. Some unbelievable talents,” Panthers winger Matthew Tkachuk said post-game, wearing a grin so wide it nearly left his face. “I just think the way that we were able to play as a team was the difference. … I just think our team was built for this moment against them.

“We don’t have as much skill as them. We definitely don’t — I don’t think there’s many teams that do. But come playoff time, it’s not about that. It’s about sticking together, it’s coming through in those moments. It’s timely stuff.”

Added his coach, Paul Maurice — who knows better than anyone what it means to win and lose in this city — of the journey his own team took this year, of what he expected when this legacy-building run began:

“You either win the Stanley Cup, or you don’t. So, we’ve got a bunch of things that we’ve got to learn to become a hard enough team to, at some point, win.”

After another post-season that hinted progress but delivered pain, another post-season of looks, chances, and uneven results, these Maple Leafs undeniably have plenty still to learn, too.