It took eight disappointing years, but the Toronto Maple Leafs finally did it. After back-to-back 2-1 wins in Games 5 and 6, they achieved the platonic ideal of playoff hockey they’ve desperately longed for in the Auston Matthews-Mitch Marner era. They won The Right Way.
The Leafs played two “perfect” games. They won a close, tight-checking, defensive, grind-it-out slog-fest — the type of victory many previous Stanley Cup champions had to pull out of their hat at least once or twice en route to glory. They doubled down with a similar win two nights later.
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Everything the Leafs have done over nearly a decade has been in painful pursuit of that moment. It’s the moment they prove they’re the kind of team worthy of winning it all by mimicking how others had prospered. Year after year they slowly chipped away at their own identity, doing what had to be done to finally prosper.
The Leafs as we knew them had become difficult to recognize for seemingly all the right reasons in the name of “defense wins championships.”
Well, aside from one crucial detail: The same result as every other season; the Leafs won nothing.
Slowly and agonizingly, the Leafs have abandoned their most potent strengths in favour of covering up perceived weaknesses. They’ve morphed into a bland, milquetoast team with a borrowed identity that prioritizes nothing but playing The Right Way to an extreme fault. And it was all for absolutely nothing, as it led them to the same place they always end up anyway.
The ends did not come close to justifying the means — it just wasted a lot of people’s time. Most importantly, the entire prime years of the team’s core.
It’s not that the Leafs should not have prioritized their defensive game and structure after past playoff failures. There were legitimate concerns on that front that needed to be addressed for this team to make noise. The problem stems from how they’ve gone about it, an issue that’s been exacerbated over the team’s last two playoff runs.
“Safe is death.”
I keep coming back to those three words, a John Tortorella mantra born two decades ago when his Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup. It means aggressively asserting a team’s dominance knowing the risks are worth the reward for a highly skilled team capable of putting on relentless pressure to that fact.
The quote rattled around my brain throughout a series against the Boston Bruins where the Leafs averaged 1.7 goals per game — less than half of what they managed during the regular season. That’s a year after finishing the playoffs scoring exactly two goals in seven straight games. For this team in particular, it should be impossible.
That is, until you say those three words again and everything starts to click.
After several playoff failures to start the Matthews and Marner era, everything comes back to playing it safe.
The players they added, the players they didn’t; the players they kept, the players they moved on from — many personnel decisions were seemingly borne out of some type of risk aversion. Most moves did make the Leafs better, but a lot of them seemed to prioritize The Right Way. Whether it was Kyle Dubas or Brad Treliving, both made several moves in that vein where being a better team often felt secondary. Going over all those moves could fill another column. Besides, you already know them.
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More than anything though, it’s how the team plays in the playoffs that speaks best to Toronto’s quest for safety above all else. That’s best represented by the team’s two best players, both of whom frequently drew deserved ire for their inability to create offense when it counts.
At a certain point, it’s not “bad luck” or “getting goalied” but simply the reality of the situation. Scoring below a point-per-game rate over more than 50 games certainly qualifies — especially when their contemporaries always find a way to flourish no matter the opponent. The Leafs’ two superstars don’t.
Since 2016-17, Matthews has averaged an Offensive Rating of plus-20 per 82 games during the regular season while Marner is at plus-14. Those are extremely high values that rate among the league’s very best with Matthews in the top five and Marner in the top 20. That’s their benchmark going into the playoffs, a reasonable expectation of what they can deliver.
They haven’t been even close.
How much of their Offensive Rating are they able to retain when it counts? Half.
Instead of being a top-five offensive player, Matthews drops to 37th. Instead of being a top 20 offensive player, Marner drops to 61st. A drop in offensive value in the playoffs can be expected … to an extent. Not like this. Not when you see all the superstar talents who were able to do the opposite and earn Cup rings for their trouble.
Matthews’ and Marner’s drops in offensive value in the playoffs are among the very worst among forwards. That the team’s captain is right there with them is obviously part of the problem, too. Toronto’s three highest-paid players are unable to elevate their game in the most meaningful ways when it matters.
But there’s a catch that comes with those numbers: What they’ve done defensively.
While it’s true that both Matthews’ and Marner’s offensive value drops significantly, it’s noteworthy that their defensive value does the opposite.
The duo have been Selke finalists in back-to-back years and their defensive ability is an important pillar of their game. In the playoffs, that defensive ability is taken a step further to the point that both Matthews and Marner grade out as top five defensive players come playoff time since 2017. Their Defensive Rating per 82 games lands a shade under plus-6, a huge jump from their already strong regular-season marks. For context, Patrice Bergeron in the playoffs is at plus-4.1 while Ryan O’Reilly is at plus-5.4.
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That tracks when looking at their on-ice numbers, especially over the past four playoffs. Both earn 58 percent of the expected goals and are even better by actual goals — all thanks to their defensive ability. Matthews is at 59 percent while Marner is at 65 percent. Toronto’s top duo consistently wins their five-on-five minutes in line with their expected ability. Those percentages are right in line with Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon over the last four years.
The problem is pace, a function of playing it safe. Having two of the best players in the world means showing as much, not using that ability to shut down the other guys.
While McDavid and MacKinnon are out there thriving in the playoffs because they assert their tempo, Toronto’s top duo seems to prefer to accept whatever tempo their opponent throws at them instead in the name of responsible defending. It’s the distinction between focusing on your own arsenal rather than obsessing over what’s on the other side of the fence. While the percentages may be similar, the actual differences are, well, the difference.
Does anyone care that the Leafs only concede 1.67 goals against per 60 with Matthews on the ice compared to McDavid’s 2.95? No, because the Leafs only score 2.45 compared to McDavid’s 4.6.
Per 60 minutes, McDavid’s goal differential per 60 is plus-1.65, over twice as much as Matthews (plus-0.78) despite similar percentages. Over 500 minutes (the amount Matthews has played in the playoffs over the past four years) that equates to a plus-13.8 goal differential for McDavid and plus-6.5 for Matthews. Marner, whose goals percentage is four percentage points higher than McDavid’s, would still come up three goals short.
What’s maddening is that it’s a complete reversal of what Matthews and Marner do in the regular season. Their five-on-five percentages, pace and differentials have been right there with McDavid and MacKinnon over the last four years. Their game just completely changes come playoff time when it actually matters.
Is that trade-off worth it? Absolutely not.
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The reason superstars have been the key to success for almost every other Stanley Cup champion is because they can separate themselves offensively in tighter games. That was supposed to be the Leafs’ luxury with their assembled core and it’s why many expected bigger things from them by now. When scoring became harder, they were supposed to have the keys to deliver.
Instead, they made sacrifices at the altar of “defense wins championships” — an unworthy mantra for a pair of players with otherworldly offensive ability.
Safe is death, and in this case, it’s the death of what should be elite offense. Some of the negative offensive change is a result of continuously struggling on the power play, too, but even that feels like a result of taking fewer risks and being far too predictable.
This change in playing style feels like the smoking gun of everything wrong with the last decade of Leafs hockey. You can take Mike Babcock away from the Leafs, but everything the team has done since feels to have been in servitude of the Babcockian way where a 1-0 win playing The Right Way somehow feels better than a 6-3 win with a couple of defensive breakdowns.
It’s also a reason to think things can still work for Toronto’s two best with a change in philosophy. That Matthew Tkachuk occupied similar territory with the Calgary Flames and has essentially done a complete reversal with the Florida Panthers should be proof of that. Sometimes it just takes a different vision rather than doing the same thing over and over again. If the Leafs’ duo was really that incapable, it stands to reason their defensive numbers would’ve gone south too.
Some may argue instead that it’s proof of two players wilting when the lights get brighter (Marner’s place next to Johnny Gaudreau isn’t exactly ideal). Maybe they do play safer on their own accord, cowering at the thought of yet another first-round disappointment and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. That the team always plays better with nothing to lose and immediately implodes the minute something is on the line feels like proof of that. The Leafs look a lot closer to the Leafs when there’s nothing to fear.
I won’t discredit that theory because it’s certainly a possibility. The cascading effect of the same thing happening again and again and again surely has a material effect on a player’s psyche.
But given the team’s two top players’ ability to maintain almost the exact same percentage of chances and goals at a slower pace, it feels a lot more like a systematic choice.
Predictable. Boring. Safe.
Toronto’s system puts those three facets into overdrive when the stakes get higher, limiting mistakes at all costs. That’s perhaps the biggest example of chasing the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Of course, it’s wise to manage pucks better, play within a structure, and stay in position to limit costly errors. But there comes a certain point where the goal becomes doing that as opposed to actually doing what it takes to win.
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Over the last few playoffs, the most damning thing about Toronto’s playoff failures has been their surprising inability to score and that comes from playing a game devoid of much risk. Watch the other top-flight offensive teams in the playoffs and they all play with pace, organize more chaos, and take the requisite risks to facilitate offense. They don’t play it safe (or nearly as so), they assert themselves with a layer of unpredictability. They do things instinctually outside the arena of what a coach insists upon. Maybe that’s why William Nylander seems to be the only member of the Core Four who routinely shows up offensively when it matters. The same goes for Morgan Rielly on the back end.
There’s a balance to be struck and after a few years of playoff hockey that may have been a little too risky, Toronto has swung way too far in the opposite direction.
Maybe that’s why John Tavares continues to trot out the company line of the team being “right there.” After all, the Leafs have spent 80 percent of the last two playoffs within one goal against three very good teams. They have kept it close. They have, technically, been “right there.”
But that’s not exactly a good thing, not seven or eight years into the Shanaplan. That’s part of the design flaw of playing it safe — it’s always going to be close because there’s a massive effort to make sure nothing happens in either direction. Slowing down the pace means lowering the margin of victory — and margin for error. It turns into a coin-flipping contest where the Leafs have landed tails way too many times.
Flip enough coins and you’re bound to get a streak of eight tails in a row. Or six tails, one heads, two tails. Whatever. Either way, it happens.
The problem with the Leafs is they’ve spent eight years leaning into that coin-flipping contest by continuing to play it safe. The best teams make their own luck, usually by stacking the deck so the chances are in their favour. Even when the Leafs have done that by building their strongest teams, they’ve opted to play a style of game that invited a higher chance of volatility.
Maybe this all stems from roster construction. It’s hard to take risks when there has only ever been one defenseman on the back end capable of doing so. Doubling down on that with three safety blankets, one on each pair, in these playoffs felt like a complete misunderstanding of what was wrong with Toronto’s blue line. It’s true they were all solid defensively and rarely made many mistakes. It’s also true they offered next to nothing in terms of jumping into the play or creating much of anything in the offensive zone. Can the team’s superstars really be expected to deliver offensively to their usual degree when they don’t have a defenseman on the ice helping them attack with numbers?
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Then again — maybe they’ve had to do it that way because the Leafs have never had the best goalie in a series. It’s easier to take calculated risks when your goalie is Jeremy Swayman, Sergei Bobrovsky, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Carey Price, Tuukka Rask or Braden Holtby. After all, the “safe” defense corps has routinely been able to mask the Leafs goaltending deficiencies, enough to make every series close. They did their part in these playoffs, too.
It all feels like it comes down to choices this franchise has made throughout the years that have prioritized the wrong thing for this specific hockey team.
It’s a team that cares more about who they face than who they are. It’s a team that cares more about getting scored on than actually scoring. It’s a team that lets the game come to them rather than asserting their own will.
Truthfully, that last point might be the biggest indictment of what they’ve spent almost a decade building toward. As Sheldon Keefe put it after Game 7, “When teams play the Leafs, they set up the game for the Leafs to beat themselves.” The best teams often have a true identity to assert, feeling comfortable playing “their game.” The Leafs are passive, often left playing the other team’s game, reacting instead of acting. It might be because they don’t really have an identity to assert anymore.
Toronto spent eight years building a program good enough to finally win the 2-1 game when it mattered most. Rather than become a team that could win the 2-1 game, though, they built one that aimed for it. That’s a huge difference.
It’s a pyrrhic victory that got this team nowhere new. The Right Way is the wrong way for this club.
The Leafs played it safe, again, and earned a reward worthy of what they risked.
Data via Evolving Hockey and Natural Stat Trick
(Photo: Vince Del Monte / NHLI via Getty Images)
