What Went Wrong For the Toronto Maple Leafs This Year?
Another year, another heart-wrenching playoff exit for the Toronto Maple Leafs and again, it's at the hands of the Boston Bruins.
Leafs nation has now watched eight years of this Toronto Maple Leafs core crash out early and lose in some of the most embarrassing and heartbreaking ways possible.
The Leafs battled through some key injuries in this series and pushed the series to overtime in game seven but at the end of the day, they couldn't get the job done.
With changes looking likely, it's time to actually take away the emotion of the series and break down what went wrong for this team.
Special Teams
Where do I begin with the putrid performance of the Leafs special teams in this series? Before the series, I wrote an article on how the Leafs can upset the Bruins and my first point was special teams. The Leafs needed to see improvement in their penalty kill and also needed their powerplay to produce some offence.
The penalty kill wasn't great but what is going to grab headlines is the fact a powerplay that had at least two of Mitch Marner, John Tavares, Auston Matthews and William Nylander on the ice at all times converted at an astonishingly bad 4.8 percent rate (Stats from ESPN.com). The numbers look bad and the eye test was just as bad. The majority of the efforts put forth by the first unit were horrific and they look even worse when you compare it to other playoff teams.
The Make up of The Defence
There's no secret what Brad Treliving tried to do with this blueline.
It was the most physical defensive core this team has had in the Matthews era and plays like the Joel Edmundson hit on David Pastrnak in game seven headlined that.
While physicality is an important part of playoff hockey and you need that on your defence, the Maple Leafs were incapable of moving the puck this series.
The Blue-Line was completely incompatible with the group of forwards the Leafs deployed and this created a major problem come playoff time.
Looking up and down this lineup the only guys that can move the puck are Morgan Rielly, Timothy Lijegren and Connor Timmins.
The rest of them are among the worst puck-handlers in the NHL.
Timmins can handel the puck, but he was a non-option for Sheldon Keefe for reasons beyond my understanding.
Time after time in the Boston series the puck went back to the point and the play died. For some reason Joel Edmundson was getting into great position and multiple times he receieved a great pass or a rebound only to remember at the last second that he was Joel Edmundson and so of course all those scoring chances went to waste.
Heading into next season, puck-moving defencemen who are reliable in their own end are what the Leafs need to focus on. They simply cannot load their blue-line up with the kind of players they had this season.
Goaltending
Heading into this series it was pretty predictable that the Bruins were going to have better goaltending regardless of if Ullmark or Swayman ended up playing. What the Leafs needed in this series was for their goalies to provide steady performances and saves in big spots. Samsonov was unable to provide that for the most part.
Ilya Samsonov started five of the seven games in this series and wasn't good enough. He played well in game two but outside of that he allowed some soft goals at crucial points in the game. Joseph Woll got into games five and six where he was spectacular in both games but suffered an injury that kept him out of game seven which leads me to my next point.
Injuries
As much as I, as well as the majority of Leafs nation, are sick of these points that look like excuses, injuries did hamper this team. Mitch Marner's high-ankle sprain was not fully healed in the palyoffs and the Leafs were without Matthews for two games, Nylander for three games, McMann for the series and Woll for game seven. The tough part of the Leafs is after eight years of failure you don't get passes on stuff like this and you need to produce results.
Lack of Offence
Much like most of the playoff series, the Leafs have been involved in during this era of the franchise, scoring dried up. John Tavares didn't produce enough but that isn't really his fault - the Leafs employed a one-dimensional centre who is the NHL's highest paid fourth liner, but despite this, they hard-matched Tavares against Pastrnak and sabatoged their ability to create offense while doing so.
Tavares needs to score more, but he also started most of his shifts in the dzone and was on the ice constantly with one of the top-five players in the NHL (and who it must be said, he did a good job of shutting down).
In addition to Tavaers, the Leafs already discussed power-play, the injuries to superstars, was the complete lack of scoring from the bottome six.
The fourth line is an offensive black-hole, while CalleJarnkrok also did not score.
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The Leafs were also unable to get much depth scoring in this series. It's unfortunate that Bobby McMann was injured because I think he could have added some much-needed depth to the lineup.