Florida Panthers’ Carter Verhaeghe, left, battles for the puck with Toronto Maple Leafs’ Morgan Rielly, right, as David Kampf, centre, looks on during first period NHL playoff hockey action in Toronto on May 14.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Morgan Rielly has seen this movie before.
As the longest-tenured member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and one who has endured every playoff disappointment that the team has suffered over the past nine seasons – and there have been a few – the sense of dismay was written all over the defenceman‘s face.
Less than 24 hours after one of the most crushing defeats of his career, a game that was as notable for the Leafs’ complete lack of compete and execution as it was for the 6-1 score line in favour of the Florida Panthers, Rielly tried to reframe the narrative.
“Obviously very disappointing,” he said Thursday of the Game 5 loss. “But at the end of the day, I mean, whether we lost the way we lost [Wednesday] night, or you lost in overtime, whatever it is, we’re still in a position where we’re right in the fight.
“We got to go down there and we got to play our best game. And that’s what we’re focused on. You can dwell on all kinds of things and be upset about effort or whatever. But I believe that this team cares, and we’re in a position now to go down there and win a very important game for our team.”
Whether this Leafs team has the resilience and fortitude to save its season on Friday at the home of the defending Stanley Cup champions remains to be seen. The core of this group did, after all, go down to Florida two years ago to eliminate a Tampa Bay Lightning team that had been to three straight finals.
Rielly’s blueline partner, Brandon Carlo, still relatively new to this franchise’s history of spring sorrows, said he took a late-night walk after Wednesday’s game to try to flush the memory of the team’s worst performance of the playoffs.
During his six-plus years with the Boston Bruins prior to the trade-deadline deal that brought him north of the border, Carlo said he was exposed to his share of lopsided setbacks, which included a 5-1 Game 5 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes three years ago, a series in which the Bruins rebounded to force a Game 7.
In other words, the Maple Leafs don‘t have sole proprietorship on playoff faceplants.
Carlo, who was on the ice for three of Florida’s goals, said the players had a frank dressing-room discussion following the final buzzer to dissect the loss. He maintains that he’s seen enough in his two-plus months in Toronto to feel that there is enough substance in this Leafs group to find a way past the Panthers.
“This team is one of the most skilled teams that I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. “If we can play the right way and kind of put all the puzzle pieces together like we have at certain points, even in this series and throughout my time here, it’s a really special group to be a part of. I have a lot of belief that we can get the job done.”
He was joined in that assessment by head coach Craig Berube, who left no doubt about what Leaf fans can expect on Friday.
“We’ll be a lot better in Game 6,” he said.
While that rallying cry may lack the requisite hyperbole to be included in Joe Namath’s Big Book of Playoff Predictions, to be fair to Berube, his team can hardly get much worse.
As someone who has been to the Stanley Cup final as both a player and as a coach, Berube was never going to get carried away by one loss, even one so pungent that it induced a fan to toss his $200-plus Auston Matthews jersey onto the ice in disgust.
Twice in the 2019 Stanley Cup final his St. Louis Blues rebounded from lopsided losses – 7-2 and 5-1 – against Carlo’s Bruins to prevail in seven games.
To Berube’s mind, the Leafs simply got wrapped up in the magnitude of the occasion, playing at home with a chance to push the defending Stanley Cup champions to the brink. Now it’s his team that has run out of margin for error.
“The first four games were competitive, we were competitive, we were skating, we were physical, we were [in on] puck battles, all that stuff,” he said. “The last game was overthinking things and not playing hockey.”
To stand any chance of extending the series to a Game 7 on Sunday, the Leafs will have to find a way to get by Sergei Bobrovsky, who was nursing a shutout streak of 143 minutes and 25 seconds before Nick Robertson finally beat him with 66 seconds to play on Wednesday. Before that, he’d saved 54 consecutive shots.
And although Toronto ended the game with the same number of shots as Florida – 32 apiece – the quality of chances, as it has been for most of the series, was massively different. Through five games, the Panthers have generated almost 50 per cent more high-danger chances, 60 to Toronto’s 41, according to Natural Stat Trick.
“Yeah, the shot volume was equal,” Berube said. “But we got to do a better job of creating more high-danger shots in my opinion than we did last game.
“Now, I’m not saying don‘t shoot the puck, but shooting the puck and then getting to the inside for a next shot and a rebound and things like that, we have to do a better job of making life more miserable on their goalie.”