The Toronto Maple Leafs laid down and let the Florida Panthers walk all over them in Game 7 on Sunday night. A potentially franchise-defining opportunity and they fell completely flat and lifeless.
Now, they move into a summer with a whole lot of question marks and no one's job truly safe for the entire team. But how about going into that offseason with the head coach of the team that knocked you out of the playoffs, saying that your fans shouldn't be too harsh?
Just to add a little bit of a sting to the loss, the team that completely ran over the Leafs and then backed up, and ran over them again this season, is trying to say that Toronto fans should not be critical of the team and completely have total faith in the front office.
"What's great for the league is hard for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their players. The passion for the Toronto Maple, the scrutiny these men are under is why everybody gets paid so much. It's a driver," Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said via Sportsnet's Luke Fox. There's a cost to it -- for them. There's a challenge. Yeah, you can hit one out of the park here, and then you're never buying lunch for the rest of your life, right? But there's a cost for these guys, for their families.
"When you lose a game like this, it's going to be rough on them. You go through a whole bunch of things that aren't wrong, but they're wrong because they lost. This is a good team. This is a much better team than we had played two years ago. Much better. It's a much better team than we played 23 years ago in the conference final. This team is in that group of teams -- like ours -- where there's 11 this year. Then there's eight. They have a chance. That's one of those teams. So, you're going to assign a whole bunch of character flaws that aren't true."
Sure, suppose we're dissecting what Maurice told the media after making the Eastern Conference Final for the second consecutive season. In that case, it all feels like a backhanded compliment for how Toronto played. A plea for the fans who have sat back and watched this team squander away some important talents for several years, to just be fine with yet another spring of sadness.
That will and should not happen. It feels abnormal to care about a team so much (like we all do) to then turn and clap for all the supposed hard work the Leafs put in to a devastating 6-1 loss in Game 7.
And even Maurice knows that, he mentioned how the passionate fan base this team has is a blessing and a curse. Well, maybe following a February loss to the Anaheim Ducks could cause some unnecessary backlash if the same level of outrage was achieved in this hypothetical situation.
But in a Game 7? With arguably the entire era of his team on the line? That is maybe the most appropriate time to be uber, uber critical of a team. To dissect every possible move and scoring chance because it all matters so much more.
So, no thank you Paul. The Maple Leafs might generally be a better team than when you faced them last, but it was the same exact result, and this team deserves what the majority of fans are saying about them.