Mirtle: The Maple Leafs need to bring their best in Game 5 to fend off skeptics

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Florida Panthers head coach Paul Maurice offered his take on playoff momentum after his team handily won Game 4 on Sunday night, shutting down the Toronto Maple Leafs 2-0 in suffocating fashion.

His view? It simply doesn’t exist — and he doesn’t expect it to affect what will be the Panthers’ 55th playoff game in the last three years in Game 5 on Wednesday in Toronto.

“We are mindful that it is one game,” Maurice said. “I don’t believe in momentum and trends. The puck will drop in the next game, and we will have to fight hard to get back to what was a pretty well-played game by our team.”

The Panthers have pretty much seen and overcome it all in going to two consecutive Finals. The Leafs, meanwhile, have mostly experienced postseason misery, including the fact that the franchise hasn’t won a series that was tied 2-2 since Auston Matthews was 6 years old.

If you want positives, history is still on the Leafs’ side here. A team that started a best-of-seven series at home and won the first two games and lost the next two has won the series 63 percent of the time in the NHL. They’ve also won Game 5, at home, 72 percent of the time.

Toronto was the better team in Game 1, too, and Game 2 and 3 were basically coin flips. On balance, this series has been very close. The biggest reason there are those who doubt the Leafs can pull this off is that they simply haven’t been able to do something like this in recent memory.

Even if, like Maurice, you believe momentum doesn’t matter and, like many, the historical record doesn’t matter, it’s a harder sell to believe the perpetual failings of the Leafs’ best players aren’t going to be a factor here.

We know by now that the core group on this roster entered this postseason needing to deliver more than they ever have before. Getting to 2-2 in Round 2 isn’t it. What comes next in what’s now a best-of-three will determine whether all of those proclamations that “This team is different!” are actually remembered as anything more than narrative building.

To be different, they have to do something different. They have to win two of the next three games.

Auston Matthews discusses strategy with his line and the defensive pairing of Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Morgan Rielly during Game 4. (Kim Klement Neitzel / Imagn Images)

The issue the Leafs face approaching Game 5 isn’t just old ghosts and looming offseason decisions. It’s that so far, they’ve fallen short in most of the areas they needed to succeed to win this series.

Prior to Game 1, this was the list of five keys to the Leafs winning the series I came up with, in no particular order:

1. Get a draw in goal
2. Have the Core Four deliver
3. Survive the Florida forecheck
4. Keep converting on the power play
5. More contributions from supporting cast

The area they’ve probably come the closest to succeeding is actually No. 1. They’ve beaten Sergei Bobrovsky 13 times in four games and whittled him down to an .875 save percentage, even after Sunday’s shutout.

The Joseph Woll / Anthony Stolarz combo, meanwhile, sits at .892, despite the young backup playing the majority of the series and despite the Panthers having generated more scoring chances overall. (Woll has saved 0.33 goals above expected; Bobrovsky is at 0.55 below.)

You can also argue, maybe, for No. 3, although Florida’s physical forecheck was certainly all over Toronto in Game 4. Earlier in the series, however, the Leafs were able to quickly break the puck out and counterattack, creating chances and key goals on odd-man rushes by taking advantage of just how aggressively the Panthers were pressing into their zone.

Defensive defenders like Chris Tanev, Jake McCabe, Brandon Carlo and Simon Benoit were absorbing a ridiculous barrage of hits and making clean, simple plays out of the zone, something Toronto needs far more of in Game 5. Otherwise, the offense gets bottled up and controlled, unable to generate forward pressure, and leading to gaffes like the no-hope pass William Nylander made in the neutral zone that led to the 2-0 goal against late in Sunday’s loss.

They’re going to need to work more as a unit, and stay patient, to crack through a Panthers team that deploys one of the more impressive defensive schemes we’ve seen in the cap era.

But even if we give the Leafs passing grades at No. 1 and No. 3, however, they fail everywhere else.

The power play, for one, is converting at just 13 percent in this series, down to less than half what it produced the previous 50-odd games. Far from a weapon, it has been a hindrance in this series, conceding chances against and sapping momentum in games again and again when the Panthers’ elbow-ish ways have put them in the penalty box.

Shot, chance and expected goals generation are all down for Toronto’s five-forward PP1 unit that was so effective in the second half of the regular season and into the Round 1 series against Ottawa. Changing it up feels foolish, however, given they don’t have other great options; this one is going to be on the Leafs’ top players to find a way to break through a Florida PK that sits at 88 percent across two rounds.

Converting on the man advantage will be a big part of the Core Four getting the gorilla off their back, too. On that top unit, only John Tavares has scored on the power play in this series. Captain Auston Matthews doesn’t have a single PP point. Nylander, who had nearly 40 percent of his production this year on the power play, doesn’t even have a shot (!) at five-on-four despite nearly 18 minutes of ice time.

That’s just not going to get it done.

As for getting more contributions from the supporting cast, the light is fading on that as a possibility. But the Leafs can’t keep deploying a third line that hasn’t scored a single goal through 10 playoff games, which means it’s time to break up Scott Laughton, Steven Lorentz and Calle Jårnkrok to try something new.

Scott Laughton may be getting to know some new linemates given the performance of the Leafs’ bottom six. (Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

Despite Max Domi’s occasional moments, the fourth line has also been completely offensively inept, with Bobby McMann and Pontus Holmberg combining for zero goals, two assists and an average of one shot on goal a game apiece in 10 postseason games.

No, the reinforcements — David Kämpf and Nick Robertson — aren’t going to set the world on fire, but what they will bring is fresh legs and new energy, something Maurice deployed to great effect in Game 3 when he brought in an entirely new line of pluggers and watched them dominate their limited minutes in the games in Sunrise.

It’s unreasonable to expect all that much offense from whoever slips into those roles, given that’s not how the Leafs are built. But surely they can get more than a collective 0.2 goals per game from their bottom-six forwards throughout a best-of-seven series?

Even a goal or two from unlikely sources would help immensely, given Game 4’s 2-0 score line is likely a sign of what’s to come the rest of the way.

The Leafs are obviously in tough, up against the defending champs and having dropped two games in a row. But I think a lot of how this is going to go comes down to how they play in Game 5, at home, where they’re 4-1 in these playoffs and have piled up 3.6 goals per game. Florida struggled on the road most of the season without last change, finishing with the NHL’s 15th best record, partly because they have a few more holes to exploit matchup-wise than in seasons past.

Leafs head coach Craig Berube found those seams and vulnerabilities in the first two games; he can likely do it again. If the Leafs can win Wednesday, that buys them two attempts to close out the series, which they’ll likely need. If they lose Game 5, however, the odds feel very long that they’ll be able to win both games 6 and 7 after three straight Ls.

Maurice may not believe in momentum, but the reality is the Panthers have established themselves as “Glengarry Glen Ross”-level closers, winning eight of their last nine playoff series in one of the best three-season runs we’ve seen.

The Leafs, decidedly, have not.

It’s not hyperbole to call Wednesday’s game as must-win as this core has faced over the last nine years. Pull it off and you quiet the doubters and give the franchise its first chance to advance to Round 3 in decades.

Lose and they’ll have Everest to scale and no margin for error.

No pressure.

(Top photo of William Nylander: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)

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