Will Meaningless Hockey Hurt Toronto Maple Leafs Playoff Chances?

It’s always nice to know you’re going to make the playoffs, but two months of meaningless hockey is a long time before the playoffs start for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Over the past few years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been lucky enough to have clinched early or at the very least, have known that they’re making the playoffs. When you have that luxury, you can mess around with your line-up and try a few things that you may not if you were fighting for your playoff lives.

The entire goal of the regular season is to make the playoffs and then turn it on when the most meaningful games start. However, it’s a lot harder to do that when you’ve had nothing to play for in months.

Momentum is  real thing in sports and there’s a reason why those teams who sometimes sneak into the playoffs go on long runs. It’s because they’ve been playing “playoff-like” games for the past month. Every game was do-or-die because they had no wiggle room to lose.

When you’re fighting for your playoff lives every night, not only can it create a tighter bond for a team but it can provide valuable experience for when the games mean the most. For example, when you sneak into the playoffs, nobody believes in you and as the underdog, you have nothing to lose.

But, when you’re the better team, points wise, all of the pressure is on you and it’s a lot harder to live up to expectations.

Meaningless Games Could Hurt the Toronto Maple Leafs

It’s a tough scenario to be in as a team because you want to know you’re in the dance, but you also want your players to play for something. You can say that the Leafs are still fighting for home-ice advantage, but how did that go last year?

It’s obviously better to have it, than not, but it hasn’t been a deciding factor for this team over the past two years.

In the perfect world, I’d say you’d want your team fighting for a playoff spot until there are roughly five games left in the season. Those last 10-14 days of the regular season can be used for rest, while the team still played hard enough for 76 games to not become complacent.

The Leafs have been virtually locked into their spot since February. For 2.5 months the team will know who they’re going to play and that can cause serious complacently.

There’s nothing the team can do now but the whole “we’ll wait until the playoffs” mentality is a hard one for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their fans. It’s obviously their jobs and they should be motivated by the playoffs, but you can’t just turn on a switch and play the best hockey of the season in April.

As much as playoff security is nice, it may have been better if there was something they had to play for right now because it could lead to the same result that we’ve seen for years.