from Luke Fox of Sportsnet,
After watching his players get booted in the opening round for a fifth straight time, and third overseeing the Toronto Maple Leafs, Mike Babcock must have felt the daggers raising from the fists of a city that swore this time things would be different.
Four times the head coach passive-aggressively blamed goaltender Frederik Andersen — arguably the club’s most valuable player through 88 games this season, saying some variation of "They threw them at the net, they went in."
He directed fans’ attention over here, to Nazem Kadri and how the third-line centre’s reckless suspension (again) might have cost the team this series.
"It was unfortunate, the incident with Naz. Obviously, he wasn’t available. It was like an injured player in the playoffs, and we thought that was going to give us some depth and would have allowed us to move Willy [Nylander] around a bit, which we were never allowed to do," Babcock said. "As a management team, we’ll look at our group and see what we can do to get better."
The optimism was so much higher, the roster so much deeper walking into TD Garden this time, yet the result was infuriatingly, deflatingly familiar.
Another horror-show elimination game in the Maple Leafs’ own zone. Another argument for grizzled experience over flashy youth. Another Game 7 victory for the Boston Bruins.
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Below, read Bruce Arthur, Steve Simmons and Kristen Shilton.
from Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star,
We tell children they shouldn’t believe in ghosts, and that’s true, but we don’t tell them you can be haunted all the same. The Toronto Maple Leafs have had some of their worst moments in Boston. Game 7s have not been kind. This is where hope, and three of this franchise’s last four playoff runs, have died.
But Toronto’s 5-1 loss to the Boston Bruins in Game 7 wasn’t fate. This was just a hockey series where Toronto had just enough parts fail, and in the end the Bruins were better than Toronto. When Toronto lost in 2013 here, it was cataclysmic system failure. Last year, Toronto made so many errors and wasn’t ready to take down a very serious team.
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from Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun,
Another year gone, another year to look to the future and hope for the forever beleaguered Toronto Maple Leafs.
This time it was supposed to be different for the Leafs. This time it could have been different. This time the team was deeper and stronger. This time the Leafs could have leapt into the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs — and in this rather twisted playoff season, into Stanley Cup contention — for the first time in 15 years.
Instead, no more playoffs. No more season. No more reason to celebrate.
The Maple Leafs have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, eliminated in a backdrop of bitterness and anger, second-guessing and finger-pointing, wondering about the roster and the coach Mike Babcock, and the general manager, Kyle Dubas, and the financial troubles around the corner: Wondering about how they lost to Sean Kuraly and Joakim Nordstrom and Marcus Johansson, the third and fourth line of the Bruins, the interchangeable parts on most National Hockey League rosters.
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from Kristen Shilton of TSN,
It was the third straight year that Toronto has been eliminated in the first round (losing to the Washington Capitals in six games in 2017) and they're well past the point of just being happy to make the dance. And so, the pain of squandering multiple opportunities to advance into the second round cut more deeply than it ever had before.
“It’s just frustration everybody feels in this locker room,” said . “It’s sad to see it end the way it did. So this is obviously a feeling we’ve experienced two years in a row. It’s not a good feeling for any of us. It’s something we want to not really experience again.”
While the Leafs iced a different lineup and had more experience under their belts than the crew that lost last April, the game played out in a critically similar fashion.
In 2018, it was ’s career-worst minus-5 performance and ’s 29-save showing, with an .893 save percentage, that drew heavy criticism for dooming for the Leafs.
By the end of this second Game 7, Gardiner was minus-3, the lowest rating among blueliners, and Andersen finished with 27 saves, for a .900 save percentage.
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