The Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games, in a hard-fought series that could have gone either way.
The Toronto Maple Leafs have lost six straight playoff series, and while I understand the frustration with losing, the fact that they drew Tampa after an 115 point franchise record season is just a bad break.
If you look around the league, the seven (non-Tampa) remaining teams’ first round opponents were comparatively a joke.
If the Leafs lost to Tampa by a single goal in the deciding game, I am pretty sure that Washington, Pittsburgh, Boston, Dallas, LA, Nashville or Minnesota would have been very easy series for them.
And now, it’s clear, after another two games, that Tampa is still the NHL’s best team.
Toronto Maple Leafs, Tampa and Florida
One of the worst takes I saw in the aftermath of the Leafs loss to Tampa were people writing about how Tampa wasn’t that good and how they weren’t the same team that won two Cups.
If anyone actually saw games six and seven, they’d never say that.
Sure, Point was injured for the last game. Yes, Kucherov wasn’t exactly the best we’ve ever seen him. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a solid top-to-bottom lineup, a great system that almost never makes an error, Victor Hedman or Andre Vasilevskiy.
Sure, Tampa was beatable, but due to how good Toronto was, not how bad Tampa became.
In game seven, the Leafs were completely dominant, but Tampa hardly let them have any clean looks at their net, and when they did get a good chance, the goalie was playing at his best.
The other thing is that even when Tampa is on their heels defending, they don’t make mistakes. The Leafs aren’t as fundamentally solid as Tampa, so they take bigger risks, which leads to more unforced errors. Tampa capitalized on these.
So to my mind, “Tampa isn’t the team they were” was the most idiotic narrative we saw this week, and it was said exclusively by people who refuse to credit this Leafs team with anything.
But if you weren’t sure how to feel about the Leafs loss, the first two games of the Tampa / Florida series should help you decide. Florida is one of three teams who finished ahead of Toronto, and they are not doing any better than the Leafs did.
Florida has arguably been the better team, but Tampa started on the road and is now up 2-0.
They won back-to-back Cups, and the Toronto-Florida combo is about as hard of a path to a threepeat as their possibly could be, but they just don’t let up.
At a certain point you just have to give Tampa the respect and realize this series wasn’t about the Leafs – it was about one of the greatest teams ever assembled in NHL history.
A team that didn’t win until 12 years after they drafted their franchise player, and whose history of team building, patience and stability is a continuing lesson to the Toronto Maple Leafs and their management.
It sucked to lose this week, but seeing up close what it takes to beat a possibly three-time Cup Winner is only going to help the Leafs out in the future.