I am, as a general rule, resistant to blaming a losing team for some sort of moral failing: bowing under pressure or not caring enough or whatever. Largely this is because it ignores the performance of the winning team, and most of the time sports really are as simple as one team playing better than the other. So it is with the skeptic's eye (but still the hater's temptation) that I find myself loath to credit the Maple Leafs' ongoing collapse, from up 2-0 on the Panthers to down 3-2 after a 6-1 shellacking Wednesday night, to some sort of inherent Leafiness. Do I really believe that the tension is too much for successful pro athletes like Auston Matthews, still goalless in the series? Is the second round that much more stressful than the first, in which they seemed fine? Would the most competitive people on Earth really lay a Game 5 stinker because they just happened to not feel like giving full effort that day?
That is for Canadian sports media to discuss all summer, and they will, and it will get very stupid. But I do find my stony resolve cracking a bit when I see what the Leafs themselves had to say about a game in which they allowed six unanswered. "We all need to be better, me included," head coach Craig Berube said.
"Everybody's got to look in the mirror," Matthews added. And then later, of the many empty seats in the third period: "We didn't give them much reason to stick around." Those might've been the more merciful ticketholders; some of those who did stay to the end tossed their Leafs jerseys onto the ice in disgust.
Then there's Mitch Marner, who's due for a massive contract this summer from someone. He was talking about how a player gets over laying an egg like they did in this one, but gave a quote that feels like it'll be applicable to all sorts of Leaf-related topics: "You flush it down the toilet."
This was a turd from puck drop. The Leafs never really challenged Sergei Bobrovsky, who had 31 saves, none of which will make a highlight reel. Toronto's top line combined for a minus-7. Three different Panthers blueliners were allowed to light the lamp, a sure sign of a disorganized defense. By the time Joseph Woll got yanked for Matt Murray after giving up his fifth, the pipes were fully clogged, the plunger was useless, and brown nasty water was spilling out. Metaphorically.
It is, I am sorry to say, extremely funny that this team was on the verge of going up 3-0 on the defending champs, until Brad Marchand of all people scored the Game 3 OT winner. From the end of that game until a last-minute mercy goal last night, the Maple Leafs went 143:25 without scoring. If suddenly shooting blanks is what dooms this club that finally seemed to have solved its Achilles' heel of goaltending and defense, I will simply have to hand to them: The Leafs are masters of finding ways to lose.
Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. It is still just 3-2, and Toronto looked like it was teetering on the edge of the toilet bowl against the Senators before they took care of business. And perhaps I am falling victim to the very temptation I decried at the start of this blog—the Panthers are after all very, very good, and they seem to have a knack for being able to turn on the afterburners and suddenly make other teams look very, very bad. Maybe there's no more to it than that. Maybe curses are fake, and patterns are just noise in the random number generator, and the Leafs can lose without necessarily being the ones to beat themselves. But of all the things they've lost over the last decade, the benefit of the doubt is stinking to high heaven.
