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.