TORONTO — Nine hours before the Toronto Maple Leafs took the ice with a chance to end his club’s season, Jon Cooper planted the seed.
Taking to the podium in Toronto on the morning of a win-or-go-home Game 5 for his Tampa Bay Lightning, the Bolts’ bench boss reflected on the two words that had this city nervy for the past 72 hours: killer instinct.
More specifically, the Maple Leafs’ continued inability to locate that instinct.
“I think when it comes into play is actually in the moment,” Cooper said, when asked about the Leafs’ history of bottling these close-out attempts. “When you’re in the moment — you’re down a goal, or up a goal — do you start thinking in the back of your head, ‘Here we go again’?”
Thursday night at Scotiabank Arena, under the watchful eye of a nervous-but-raucous home crowd, the Maple Leafs were once again confronted with that moment. And once again, they left the opportunity on the table, letting Tampa off the mat with a 4-2 loss that sends the series back stateside for Game 6.
And yet, on a night that should’ve felt familiar, a night that should’ve risen the ghosts of old questions to once again haunt this Maple Leafs core, it wasn’t so familiar after all.
“It was a tight game through and through,” Auston Matthews said from the locker room after the final buzzer cut his club’s comeback attempt short. “We had some good chances we didn’t capitalize on. … We kept fighting ’til the end. But obviously it wasn’t enough.”
On this night, it wasn’t a cold start, an ill-timed mistake, or an unwillingness to impose their will that undid Toronto’s chance to close out this series in five games. This time, they checked the boxes — Morgan Rielly drawing first blood with a goal six minutes in, the club weathering the type of penalty storms that would’ve sunk them in the past, the home side throwing bodies and pushing back when the moment called for it.
In this one, it was simply a battle of inches, the margin for error narrowing with seasons on the line. And one man, in one net, besting the other.
“They dug their heels in tonight. And I think who really dug his heels in tonight was the goalie,” Cooper said post-game, after netminder Andrei Vasilevskiy turned aside 23-of-25 shots to hold off the Maple Leafs. “His name’s come up a lot, for various reasons, over the last couple days.
“I think he proved he can handle the high shots.”
Rewind a year, and No. 88 in the Bolts’ cage seemed like a death sentence for opposing teams with hopes of post-season glory. This time around, the two-time champ’s been shown to be human, Vasilevskiy entering Game 5 with a paltry .856 save percentage. But it was the past few days that surely lit a fire under the ‘tender and his defence corps, after continued discussions in Toronto of the vulnerabilities in the veteran’s game, of Toronto’s ability to exploit them over the past three tilts.
He wasn’t flawless in this one, allowing the Maple Leafs to rile up their crowd with an early goal, and again with a late one that cut the Bolts’ lead to a single shot and threatened to undo a steady performance. But when his club needed him most — when Toronto put together one of their most composed, dangerous power-play efforts of the season in search of an equalizer, when they sowed chaos in his crease time and time again late in the game, a comeback seeming inevitable — No. 88 did what he does best.
“We kept them to the outside — except for Marner’s breakaway. That made the heart skip a beat,” Cooper said of the Maple Leafs’ golden gift of a chance in the third period, which nearly tied the game until Vasilevskiy thwarted it. “But that’s what Vasy does. It’s a one-goal game, and you need the save — he gives you the save.”
For three straight meetings, his counterpart on the other side of the rink did much of the same. It’s precisely how Ilya Samsonov fought for and won the starting job for this Maple Leafs post-season run. The 26-year-old’s shown a penchant for coming up with the timely ones.
Turning aside 34 of the 37 shots he was tested with in Game 5, he could hardly be pointed at as the reason his Maple Leafs came up short in their close-out bid — particularly with the same defensive pairing faltering in front of him on all three of the goals allowed. But in a battle like this one, with the margin for error slimmed down to a sliver, a small handful of lapses were enough to give Tampa life.
The first came midway through the first period, just 25 seconds after Rielly opened the scoring for the Maple Leafs.
With the crowd roaring, the home team puffed up with hope and belief, the Lightning took the puck back up ice on the first shift after the first goal, and threw it on net. Samsonov made the initial save, kicking out the smallest of rebounds with his left pad — it was enough to erase Toronto’s lead, Anthony Cirelli finding the puck at the netfront and whipping it into the twine.
“When Rielly scores, for Cirelli to answer 25 seconds later — I don’t know where this game goes if we don’t answer that quick,” Cooper said of the play. “That was a huge, huge moment in the game for us.”
Early in the second period, another lapse — Mikey Eyssimont driving down the left wing, bypassing a wandering Justin Holl easily, and beating Samsonov clean.
“He was almost one-on-one with me. He just gets a good shot,” Samsonov said simply, when asked about the goal post-game. “A good goal.”
It would be tough to fault the netminder on the Lightning’s third of the night, the Bolts gifted a point-blank shot in the slot off a brutal Zach Aston-Reese giveaway, the unexpected chaos leaving Samsonov out of sorts, sliding into his own defender. Still, it proved to be a back-breaker, and the eventual game-winner.
Point to any other moment in the tilt — weathering an early barrage of shots from the Bolts to start the game off, holding the Lightning at bay as they repeatedly hemmed Toronto in its own zone, or bailing out his teammates on the penalty kill when it could’ve spiralled further — and there’s no doubt No. 35 did what he could to give his club a chance to win.
The problem was, in the end, Vasilevskiy did just a little bit more.
“He’s proven time and time again that he’s the best in the business,” defender Victor Hedman said of the former Vezina and Conn Smythe winner post-game. “He comes up big when we need him. You know, we obviously don’t want to give up those kind of breakaways, but stuff like that’s going to happen throughout games. That’s when you need your best players to be your best players.
“He’s obviously one of our absolute top players, and he proved that tonight.”
Two nights from now, Samsonov and the Maple Leafs will get another shot to prove they can rise to the moment too, that they can impose their will the way they did three times coming into this nail-biter. And they can expect the test to be just as stiff, the margins just as slim, the team across from them working with the same seasoned, desperate tunnel vision.
“Game 7 is irrelevant. Game 6 is all that matters, and it’s about just winning one game,” Cooper said of the task ahead for his group. “They’ve punched us a couple times in the face, we just punched them back. We’re both still standing.
“Somebody at some point’s going to get a knockout punch.”