Mirtle: Maple Leafs headed to Round 2 thanks to new-look roster

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It was the day before Game 6, a game that felt like a must-win for a Toronto Maple Leafs team that had just turned a 3-0 series lead into 3-2, and a franchise that had blown so many elimination games in the past eight years.

But when a question came about the need for his core players to deliver, head coach Craig Berube swatted it away immediately.

“It is on everybody on the team,” Berube said. “I get it. All I hear around here is ‘Core. Core. Core. Core Four.’ But it is on everybody on the team. We are a team. It is on the whole team, not just four guys.”

A little more than 24 hours later, the Leafs are headed to Round 2, after a dramatic 4-2 win that eliminated the Ottawa Senators on Thursday night in Kanata, Ontario. While Auston Matthews and William Nylander delivered with key goals early, what was different this time compared to so many playoff disappointments in the past is that the beleaguered core had more help.

Nineteen players played for Toronto in Game 6. Nearly 40 percent of them weren’t here for any of the failures in years past.

That includes starting netminder Anthony Stolarz, who came in on a cheap tandem contract as a free agent, put up eye-opening numbers during the season and significantly outplayed Vezina winner Linus Ullmark in the series, allowing four fewer goals in the six games.

It also includes a dramatically rebuilt defense core, with three newcomers — one on each pairing — who stabilized a team that had been prone to giving up backbreaking goals in big moments in so many other deciding games.

Chris Tanev, for one, might have quietly been the series MVP, as he ate every defensive zone shift and tough matchup and calmly turned the puck the other way, no matter what chaos was happening around him.

Brandon Carlo, meanwhile, came in at the trade deadline from Boston and immediately turned struggling veteran Morgan Rielly back into something resembling his former self. And Oliver Ekman-Larsson chipped in with two key goals and was a steady presence in key moments on what has to be one of the best third pairs in the postseason this year.

Having those three veterans over last year’s makeshift D — i.e. the departed Joel Edmundson, Timothy Liljegren, TJ Brodie and Ilya Lyubushkin — proved an absolutely huge upgrade, allowing Toronto to limit the Senators to just eight five-on-five goals in the six games. (Only the Capitals gave up fewer in Round 1 — and their series lasted only five games.)

Up front, the additions were more subtle this season, given how much the Leafs already have allocated to their stars. But Max Pacioretty, the veteran who signed for near league minimum and missed three months with injuries, delivered in the game’s biggest moment, firing home the winning goal with under six minutes to play — the kind of clutch scoring from a depth player they’ve lacked so many postseasons past.

MAX PACIORETTY WINS THE SERIES FOR TORONTO 🚨pic.twitter.com/fJsHqvQ0v3

— NHLonTNT (@NHL_On_TNT) May 2, 2025

Scott Laughton and Steve Lorentz filled out an important checking trio with Calle Järnkrok that was ultimately elevated from fourth line to third when some of the incumbents weren’t able to get the job done throughout the series.

I think it’s fair to say that if you swapped in last year’s roster for this one — downgrading in goal, on the blue line and the checkers up front — the Leafs very likely don’t come out on top, given how close the margins were. Full credit to Ottawa’s young cast for pushing the way it did, even after two crushing overtime losses in Games 2 and 3, keeping things close right through to the end.

But if that’s Ilya Samsonov in net for so many 2-1 and 3-2 stretches of games, you’re far less confident the series goes your way. The same can be said before the additions of Tanev, Carlo and Ekman-Larsson, one of whom was on the ice for basically every even-strength or PK shift of the series.

And say what you will about the Leafs’ depth up front, but a year ago they were rolling out fourth lines with Ryan Reaves, Noah Gregor and Connor Dewar on them, in the playoffs (!), players you couldn’t trust or bury in the D-zone and get results against good players the way they did with Laughton and Lorentz.

It’s a credit to GM Brad Treliving’s offseason makeover that so many new pieces came through in this series, not just with their on-ice play, but with their experience and calm demeanor, especially when things looked like they might go off the rails when they lost Games 4 and 5. Leafs management didn’t have acres of salary-cap space to overhaul the lineup last July, but what room it did possess, it largely sunk into the back end — despite the fact that depth scoring had been an issue in the postseason in the past — and made value buys such as Stolarz and Lorentz.

Adding Carlo in March was vital, too, given how shaky Toronto’s bottom two pairs had been for long stretches of the year.

Whether these reinforcements are going to be enough against the defending champion Florida Panthers is a fair and important question. Winning one round, after all, was not the goal for Toronto this season. But given how the Leafs played in Round 1, the bigger questions are likely to continue to be around their top players and if they can be true gamebreakers late in a series against a contender.

They’ll need to elevate even further for Toronto to move on. Without question.

What was stress-tested and worked against Ottawa was the bend-but-don’t-break play of the Leafs’ D, which brings a level of physicality and defensive ability at the net that Toronto hasn’t had in decades. And that the Leafs will desperately need against an aggressive, crash-and-bang forechecking team like Florida.

It’s fair to ask if Stolarz will hold up against his former team, given he had an .869 save percentage over the last three games of Round 1. And to contemplate if the Leafs will get enough offense from down the lineup, given how well the Panthers shut down the Lightning in their first-round series.

In spite of all that, what’s unequivocal is that this is a group better equipped for the challenge in front of them. It’s no longer all about the Core Four, not because they’re “a team,” but because there’s simply more there to help Matthews and company get the job done.

The Leafs are going to be the underdogs in Round 2, despite having more points in the standings and home-ice advantage. That’s how it goes when you’ve won two series in two decades and you’re up against a club that has a shiny new Cup ring and has been to the final two years in a row. The Leafs’ ghosts or demons or whatever you want to call them aren’t dead and gone.

But I don’t think Toronto makes it this far without all the helping hands it’s added over the past 12 months.

We’ll soon see if it’s enough to give the Leafs a chance to do even more.

(Photo: Chris Tanouye / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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