Toronto Maple Leafs Have All But Clinched Home Ice Advantage

The Toronto Maple Leafs have all but clinched home-ice advantage for their upcoming playoff series against what will almost certainly be the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Yes, the Toronto Maple Leafs will play Tampa for the second year in a row.

The Lightning have gone to the Stanley Cup Final three seasons straight, winning twice.  That is a pretty poor reward for being the 4th best team in the NHL (by points percentage, as of this writing).

It really illustrates how poorly the NHL’s playoff seeding is set-up when three of the best teams in the entire league are in the same division and one of them is guaranteed to be eliminated after the first round, though this is due to Tampa’s perceived abilities based on the last couple of years, and not their overall spot in the standings, which is lower than you might think.

Hopefully this year it will be the Lightning, who are eliminated, but it’s basically a coin-flip no matter how good the Leafs play because they’ll be going up against one of the best goalies in the history of the NHL.

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Tampa Bay Lightning v 2.0

Last year the Lightning won, with the help of the referees.  The Leafs should have won game six, but a goal which always counts was inexplicably called back.

Then, games seven, the Leafs played great, and Matthews and Marner were amazing – unfortunately, Vasilevskiy had one of the best games of his life.

This year, the Leafs will once again most likely have home ice advantage.  They are currently five points up on Tampa, the same amount they beat them by last year.  Right now the Leafs have two games in hand, and nine games to go.

It is clear that the Leafs are now the better team – a 164 game sample size is going to confirm it.  Add in last year’s deserved victory, Tampa’s recent horrible play, the fact that they’ve played an insane amount of games over the last four years, and the Leafs should be decent favorites,

Of course, that doesn’t really mean anything, but perhaps this matchup isn’t as unlucky as it seems.  That said, I’d feel a whole lot better if they were playing Florida.

Unfortunately, any combined three points in Tampa’s favour or which Florida misses out on will prevent the Panthers from catching them.   It is highly unlikely, but I guess anything is possible.

The most likely situation is that the Leafs will play Tampa and have home ice advantage.  If the NHL did 1 vs 8, the Leafs would play the Rangers, and ironically, if they did 1 vs 16 (which I think would be the best way to make the playoffs less random) they’d play Tampa.