Are the Toronto Maple Leafs playoff chokers or are they just sick?

Nobody is more tuned into the Toronto Maple Leafs than Steve Dangle and he has a very interesting theory regarding the team's failures right now.

Over the past week, we've continued to see weird illnesses with players missing practice, morning skates and even game-action, but it hasn't really been talked about. You would have thought that the mainstream media would have ran with a story by now, but it looks like Steve Dangle is the first to bring it up, and I really hope it's true.

As you can see in this clip, he brings up Antony Stolarz' injury, which was a freakish play to begin with. Obviously he was hit in the head by a puck and a player, so the concussion can 100 percent be true, but the fact that he puked on the bench immediately after is suspect. As we all know, puking is a legitimate sign of a concussion, so I'm not questioning his injury, but we've seen hundreds of players get concussions playing hockey and this is the first person I can remember ever seeing puke on the ice.

Are the Toronto Maple Leafs chokers, or just sick?

That injury felt like it could have been tied more towards a sickness and it's possible that Stolarz tried to fight through the illness, but it was just too much to handle, so the "concussion" forced him out of the game. Every competitor wants to play and Stolarz deserved the net more than Joseph Woll so he may have just fought through it, hoping he would be okay, but unfortunately the illness was too much to handle.

As for the rest of the team, Dangle brings up examples of Chris Tanev and Matthew Knies, who all missed time due to an "equipment issue" which is something that rarely happens in a game, let alone twice in a week. Not only that, but we've seen Auston Matthews miss multiple pre-game skates and then Oliver Ekman-Larsson was left off the ice on Tuesday because he is a "little sick."

By all accounts, there is a flu-bug running through the Leafs dressing room right now and it could be. a reason why they lacked intensity on Sunday night. They played one of their worst games of the season and as Dangle mentioned, it may not be becuase of a lack of experience or that they're "quitters" but it could be just because they're sick.

This isn't the first example of a bug going through a dressing room. Things like this happen all the time, but it doesn't usually happen in the playoffs. Typically you'd see something like this happen in the winter months because that's when sickness is more relevant. However, if one person on the Leafs is sick, it's not shocking that the rest of the team is falling one-by-one as it's almost impossible to stop.

The Dangle angle is obviously not a report, and is more of a theory, but I am personally behind it. The way they played in Game 4 looked like a team that was sick, so it's quite possible that their lack of intensity was due to illness and two straight days off could be a huge benefit to them on Wednesday night.