When will the fans get to celebrate: Maple Leafs lost to Senators with 0-4 at home
Patience may well be a virtue, but rapidly becoming a prerequisite for fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Obviously the team’s 58-year Stanley Cup drought is well documented, but now the 21-year wait for a playoff series win on home ice is starting to get tiring. The franchise got something of a monkey off its back two years ago by finally winning a playoff series – on the road in Tampa Bay – to end a 19-year hiatus in that department, but following Tuesday night’s 4-0 home loss to the Ottawa Senators, the question now is when will the fans inside of Scotiabank Arena get to celebrate advancing in the post-season.
Well, if the Leafs can’t close out the Senators in the nation’s capital in Thursday’s Game 6, they’ll get another chance to do so on Saturday, but that’s not exactly anyone’s idea of a welcome development. Not anyone from the blue-blooded side of Ontario, anyway. Not when they were up 3-0 in the series before last weekend.
“It’s not supposed to be easy,” said Mitch Marner after the Leafs lost their second straight game to the Senators. “This is never supposed to be easy. So we knew it was gonna be a challenge. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. They pushed back the last two games.
“Now we got to go into their building and play our best game. And we’ve been a great road team all year.”
Thomas Chabot and Dylan Cozens both scored their first career postseason goals and Tim Stutzle and captain Brady Tkachuk added empty-netters to account for the scoring Tuesday night, while netminder Linus Ullmark made the win stick with his first career playoff shutout, turning aside all 27 shots he faced.
At the other end of the rink, Anthony Stolarz made 15 saves for the Maple Leafs.
In and around Toronto, the loss will naturally raise the haunting spectre of three years ago – and the 3-1 series lead that was ultimately squandered against the Montreal Canadiens. Despite being up 3-0 in this series, Toronto has now lost Games 4 and 5, and will head into Thursday’s Game 6 against a youthful Senators squad gaining in confidence and experience with every game, and one that is busy channeling a famous underdog from another sport.
Tkachuk had let slip in the days leading up to Game 4 that he has been watching a Netflix documentary chronicling the famous Boston Red Sox comeback against the New York Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series.
While that remains the first and only time a Major League Baseball team has successfully overturned a 3-0 series deficit, in the National Hockey League it has happened on four occasions. Not that Tkachuk likely needs reminding of that fact, given that he shares a dressing room with Claude Giroux, who took part in the second-most recent occasion, when the Philadelphia Flyers came back to eliminate the Boston Bruins in 2010.
However, the Senators’ confidence likely got a shot in the arm given that Toronto is not exactly a lock when it comes to putting teams away. After Tuesday’s loss, its current core now boasts a less-than-sterling 1-13 record in elimination games since the start of the 2018 playoffs.
One of the reasons behind that is the struggles of the Leafs’ three biggest offensive sparkplugs, with Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander accounting for just six goals combined in those 14 elimination games.
“Obviously, they get the first goal, and we’re just kind of chasing the game from there,” Matthew said Tuesday. “But I thought we did good things, but then in the end, there’s still little plays, execution, it’s the small details, and they made good on their chances, and here we are.”
Head coach Craig Berube was less than flattering about the Matthews line – featuring Matthews, Marner and Matthew Knies – saying that they didn’t bring enough speed through the neutral zone, and that too many of their trips to the offensive zone were “one and done” and failing to produce any stops.
But he was critical of much of the team’s offensive play, saying that despite Ottawa having “jammed up” the area in front of the crease, his team still tried to force the puck through there too much.
“We killed a lot of our opportunities, I thought, and probably more in the second period than any other period where we gained the back of the net,” he said. “We had time to come out, and we tried to force it into the crease area too much and killed our momentum by doing that.”
Still, as someone who has made a trip to the Stanley Cup winners’ circle, Berube isn’t about to get too carried away, unlike some of the home fans that booed the team off the ice after the final buzzer.
“Stick with it. We’re up 3-2 in the series,” he said, describing the message he gave to his team after the game. “It’s playoff hockey. There’s a lot of ups and downs. We need composure. I talked about it, and we got to stay composed and stay poised, and we’ll figure out some things and be better next game.”
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
