While it was easy to be in denial and come up with reasons why Mitch Marner was finding a whole lot of playoff success with the Vegas Golden Knights, with his latest goal every Toronto Maple Leafs fan should now just be angry.
A lot has been made of Marner's production in his first postseason outside of Toronto. He has led the entire league in playoff scoring and has been heralded as some player that the Leafs sort of ruined and how the hockey world never got to see him shine. But then Leafs fans came back with the reality that he was doing this against teams like the Utah Mammoth and Anaheim Ducks, instead of the behemoth Tampa Bay Lightning or Florida Panthers every year.
Well, that rationale has just been unraveled and now we get to just point and yell at our screens and ask ourselves why the heck Mitch Marner couldn't do all of this while playing for his hometown team.
Mitch Marner scores goal of the playoffs, and it's frustrating
In the opening minutes of Game 6 between the Golden Knights and Ducks, Marner scored what should be the best goal of this year's playoffs and honestly one of the best goal in recent memory. It's nuts. It's stupid. It's upsetting.
MITCH MARNER OPENS THE SCORING IN GAME 6 WITH AN UNREAL MOVE 🤩 pic.twitter.com/k28iLmZ4Ky
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 15, 2026
Marner was able to take a big breakout pass for a breakaway, but Ducks blueliner Jackson LaCombe is draped all over him. The former Leaf tries to shake off the top Anaheim defenseman off. He then turns and stops right in front of Lukas Dostal, dekes his brain off its stem, gets the Ducks goalie to bite hard all while he's putting his body between the goal and the puck. So, of course, naturally, he just decided to dip and dangle and score the game-opening goal between his legs.
It's so stupid and we hate that we have to admit that it was so cool and made our jaw drop watching it live.
While we had all the excuses in the world why Marner was finding this success and scoring rate in the playoffs all of a sudden, a goal like that just makes us ticked off and wonder why he couldn't do something like that while wearing blue and white. All we got was the mediocre and bad playoff performances of his life. And now Marner, in Game 6 and with a chance to punch his ticket to the Western Conference Final -- further than he has ever been in the playoffs -- he was able to pull off a goal like this.
We have fully turned all of our denial now into anger and screaming to the sky wondering why.
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