Ransacking Toronto isn't enough for these Panthers
Two nights after they prolonged Toronto's generational agony, the champs spanked Carolina in Eastern Finals Game 1.
The Florida Panthers honored the cliche last year. They acted as if the Stanley Cup was the hardest trophy to win. They had a 3-0 Final lead over Edmonton and then turned it into a Carl Hiassen novel, stopping just short of the alligator’s mouth. They did win, but they put their bodies through the wringer and their fans on the rack.
Twelve months later, the Panthers are threatening to ruin this Stanley spring. Ever since they trailed Toronto, 2-0, in Games 1-2 of the semifinals and then trailed, 3-1, in Game 3, they have resembled Scottie Scheffler at Pitch-’N’-Putt. Of the 25 goals that have been scored in Panthers’ games since, the Panthers have scored 20. That includes the three consecutive wins over the Maple Leafs and, 48 hours later, a 5-2 whipping of the Carolina Hurricanes Monday night, in Game 1 of the East final.
Florida had swept Carolina at the same juncture two years ago, on its way to a Final loss to Las Vegas. Nothing really changed here. The Hurricanes began the game with a slew of icings and offsides, and the Panthers’ pressure forced them to pass the puck into each other’s skates, or just past everyone’s reach. Noticing how Carolina had dominated the puck in its five-game win over Washington, Florida camped out in the neutral zone and broke up passes and stopped clean entries, and when Carter Verhaeghe somehow guided a backhand past Frederik Andersen into the net, the Caniac crowd began to get the hint. Later, Aaron Ekblad used rookie defenseman Scott Morrow as a screen to beat Anderson again, and the game devolved from there, awakening only when Brad Marchand took liberties with Carolina’s Shane Gostisbehere, who replied by shooting the puck at him. Exchanging wet willies with the Panthers is not going to work. They’re predatory at every level, and they don’t play well with others.
Apparently there will be lots of time in the next two series to applaud Florida’s roster construction, but this game illustrated the quality of the backup singers. Niko Mikkola, a 6-foot-5, 198-pound marauder who serves as Florida’s fourth defenseman, was forever disrupting Carolina. Anton Lundell and Eetu Luostarinen, fellow Finns who play on a remade third line with Marchand, raised the tempo and the muscle, and Luostarinen scored his fourth goal of the playoffs. A.J. Greer also represented the fourth line with a goal. And Florida can get away with such avid forechecking, and such heavy defensive involvement, because Sergei Bobrovsky is once again the goaltender.
While all that was going on, a debate raged throughout Toronto on the fate of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and other defeated Leafs. Should they be given a fair trial, or just go directly to El Salvador?
This current wheelbarrow of Leafs is 0-for-6 in Game 7s and has a 2-11 record in all playoff series. Matthews, Marner, William Nylander and Morgan Rielly (sometimes replaced by John Tavares) are known as the Core Four, the players that club president Brendan Shanahan assembled to bring a Cup to Toronto at some point before Justin Bieber enters memory care. As it turned out, the Core Four was no match for Florida’s corps. The Maple Leafs were too few and not proud enough.
Nylander, who was second in NHL goal scoring, did not have a point in Toronto’s last four games. Matthews had one goal in the Florida series. So did Marner, although he also had five assists, but his blind backhand pass in Game 5 that became a turnover and a Florida goal quicker than you can say “no movement clause,” is his current definition. Marner got through the season without signing a new deal, and he nixed a trade that would have sent him to Carolina for Mikko Rantanen, now in Dallas and probably the top Conn Smythe Award contender.
Was Sam Bennett’s Game 2 elbow, which knocked Toronto goalie Anthony Stolarz out of the series, the chop that felled the tree? Maybe, but Joseph Woll bordered on brilliance when he got the net. A brisk reading of the Toronto media would indicate that the Leafs were undone by the “character shortages” of their top players. Matthews seemed to underline that when he said the Leafs had “too many passengers” in Game 7, a quick postgame comment that he likely regrets.
Here’s a theory. The Leafs weren’t that good and they knew they weren’t that good, and yet they were in a city which assumed they were destined to become Gretzky, Beliveau and Orr at their peak. They had no elite defenseman, no energy in their bottom six except for Max Domi, and no one worth fearing. The fallout of those failed assumptions landed right on the backs of the players, who were being held accountable for decades’ worth of wretchedness.
What is pressure? According to ESPN’s PK Subban, pressure is “having food poisoning and not knowing where the bathroom is.” It’s also fear of failure, fear of consequences, fear of disappointing the outside world. The Chicago Cubs were dealing with a 108-year drought in 2016, and now they had built a contender, and their fans traveled with signs that read, “It’s Gonna Happen.” Manager Joe Maddon did not pretend the demon was not at the door. Instead, he preached opportunity and excitement. He kept telling the players how sweet “the moment” would be. It was, but only because a quick storm interrupted Game 7 long enough for Jason Heyward to gather the Cubs in the weight room in Cleveland and cajole them into pushing through.
But a lot of Cubs fans reveled in their misery. It became a badge, an identity. They turned it into literature. The fatalism of Maple Leaf fans seems more rooted in anger. On Monday morning the city had become a state of depression, catatonia and disarray for at least the 51st time.
Said Florida’s Matthew Tkachuk the day after Game 7: “If their team wasn’t in Toronto, dealing with all the crazy stuff outside of it, like, they’d be an unbelievable team and such a hard team to play. They just have so much to deal with, and I feel bad.”
Well, not that bad.
This Toxic Toronto argument can only be taken so far. Edmonton is just as demanding of its team as Toronto is, and yet Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl always rise to playoff levels, although neither has won a Cup yet. The civic fishbowl does not seem to bother the Philadelphia Eagles or the Los Angeles Dodgers. It’s just a matter of finding the code that turns Not Lose into Win. Why couldn’t Greg Norman close the deal the way Tiger Woods always did?
It brought back the words of Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger, when he went with unproven players in 2008 instead of the veterans who had lost so often. Bad experience, he reasoned, is worse than no experience.
And it goes back to where we started. The Stanley Cup is the Everest of team sports. It took Ray Bourque 23 years to win one. It took Alex Ovechkin 13. It took Dave Andreychuk 22 and Teemu Selanne 16.
Patrick Marleau, Steve Yzerman, Jarome Iginla, Marcel Dionne, Henrik Lundqvist, Dale Hawerchuk, Pavel Bure and Eric Lindros never did.
As we watch Florida lay waste to the rest of the postseason, it’s worth remembering that they came within one loss of entering the longest Summer of Shame. They looked down into that crevasse and they got to the other side. Perhaps a reconfigured Toronto squad can close its eyes and make that same leap. Until then, it’s Same Old Leafs, a team that struggles to leave everything behind, its acronym included.