The Maple Leafs were primarily undone by their special teams in a regulation loss to the Florida Panthers, setting back their division title pursuit with 17 games remaining.

Your game in 10:

1.   For many years now in this current Maple Leafs era, we’re often left wondering whether the team will be ready to meet the gravity of a big-game moment with the appropriate intensity right from the drop of the puck. After a couple of 50-50 shifts to start, the Maple Leafs got off to a better early start to this game than anyone could’ve realistically drawn up from a goal-scoring, emotional, and physical standpoint.

It started with John Tavares‘ 27th of the season just two minutes into the game. When William Nylander broke the zone with the puck and had both Calle Jarnkrok and Tavares going to the net for a potential outnumbered situation in front, most times, you want the puck delivered to the net for a potential second opportunity. Nylander was on his off-wing, though, which made it harder to deliver a puck through with a defender gapped right up on him as well as some backside pressure in place. Nylander also has more creative license than most; he stopped up, evaded a defender up high, and ripped a diagonal pass to Tavares, who read off of Nylander really well to fade out and open up for a one-timer in the low left circle. The finish caught a piece of Sergei Bobrovsky but was ripped hard enough to go through him.

Tavares now has six goals and 11 points in 10 games since the 4 Nations Break, and he is now three away from 30. He fell one short of 30 last season in 80 games, but despite missing seven games already this season, he is virtually assured to hit the milestone this year, to go along with a near point-per-game pace so far. He’s also pacing for his highest average time on ice in five seasons. It’s a heck of a response to what could’ve been an awkward year after relinquishing the captaincy at the beginning of a contract season.

2.   Max Domi took some heat before the game for his comments about the team not giving a shit about the division title. It was the kind of comment better reserved for a player on a team that’s won division titles and several playoff series in the recent past. For a Leafs team that’s constantly facing the toughest path in the playoffs and bowing out early, the division should matter a good deal. Steven Lorentz and Jake McCabe‘s answers about wanting to win the Atlantic and set themselves up with the best chance for success were the right way of handling the question.

To be somewhat charitable to Domi, it seemed like it was maybe his own way of saying something similar to what Paul Maurice said in the other room, which is that we want to treat every game with the utmost intensity in the final month before playoffs and let the chips fall where they may.

In any event, Domi’s actions ended up speaking louder than his words. On his second shift of the game, he caught Carter Verhaeghe with a booming, clean open-ice hit, then ragdolled Nate Schmidt in a fight and landed a big upper-cut (plus a couple more shots) before firing up the home crowd. Watching the build-up to the fight, Schmidt wasn’t looking to force Domi to answer the bell here at all, but Domi was jacked up and wanted one anyway.

Domi can say pretty much whatever he wants in the media if he responds this way to big games on the ice. For a player who has been hard to notice (or notice in a good way) the vast majority of games this season, it was a breath of fresh air and a reminder of the gamer quality in Domi when he has the bit between his teeth. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s see if he can build on it as a sort of symbolic “the real season/hockey starts now” kind of moment for him. Especially on a Leafs team for which all that matters at this point is the spring-time performances, there is plenty of time to rewrite the narrative of his season.

3.   Unsurprisingly, as they’re the Cup champs (even if they are missing a few big pieces presently), the Panthers weren’t rattled and settled into the game after the first four or five minutes, establishing their vaunted forecheck and getting on top of the Leafs at points. The game was tight, hard-checking, and very little was happening at either end for the seven or eight minutes after the 1-0 goal.

The Leafs generated the next notable chance with around eight minutes left in the first when David Kampf won a puck battle aginst Eetu Luostarinen in the offensive zone and slipped a pass to Bobby McMann for a grade-A look in front that McMann fired wide.

In that same sequence, Kampf tried to take a route behind the goalie through the crease, which wasn’t particularly smart, but the call was still pretty soft considering the contact was minimal/accidental and it didn’t affect the play. The kill went smoothly, as the Leafs pressured aggressively throughout and got several clears/changes to keep their legs fresh, only asking one relatively easy save of Anthony Stolarz.

All in all, you had to be pretty happy with the first 15 minutes from the Leafs from a score, competitiveness, and pace-of-play perspective.

4.   With just over three minutes left in the period, the refs intervened into a good period of hockey with a terrible call. The Leafs, for their part, gave up a 2-on-1 just before the penalty. William Nylander saw OEL was committed down the wall and took over the defensive responsibility at the point, but for some reason, he stood there, turned, watched, and didn’t fall back as a puck went over his head, as if he forgot he was the fill-in right defenseman on the play.

Simon Benoit — and a back-tracking Calle Jarnkrok — did well to break up the initial chance, but in the ensuing scramble, the ref took forever to blow down the play. It led to a melee around Stolarz in which OEL justifiably turned and took a shot at Samoskevich, who immediately retaliated with a two-hander. The refs picked out only OEL for roughing, which was completely ludicrous.

5.   The Panthers then struck quickly on the PP on a goal that — similar to their later one on the power play, which was actually worse than this one — was just too easy for the opposition from the Leafs’ perspective.

With the puck in the corner (Sam Reinhart in possession), Auston Matthews was way late on the read of the pass to the middle to Samoskevich (who, again, should’ve been in the box if the refs were going to call anything at all, but I digress). Samoskevich was able to walk partially out in front and jam a puck into Stolarz, and Sam Bennett beat McCabe at the back post to jam in a loose puck. Just like that, a pretty solid first period was undone by a PK that continues to be a serious problem late into the season for the Maple Leafs.

Especially knowing Matthews is not dominating five-on-five play at the level the Leafs need him to, why they turn to him so often to start PKs alongside Marner continues to make me scratch my head. Save him up for a big post-PK shift with totally fresh legs. Kampf-Marner has a long history of reasonable success together, they now have Laughton-Jarnkrok as another pair, and they can still mix in Matthews here and there with Knies when they want to (or with Marner if he’s taking another shift later on in the kill).

6.   Early in the second period, when AJ Greer took liberties with the Leafs’ goalie and punched Holmberg as a third man in during the ensuing scrum, the refs correctly sent him off the ice for the Leafs’ first power-play of the game.

The PP started off poorly — turnovers from Marner and Knies — before Marner, from the neutral zone following a clearance, sprung Matthews through the middle for a breakaway off a Florida breakdown. Dmitry Kulikov scrambled back to partially disrupt Matthews, who sailed it high. With just three goals in his last 16 (one an empty-netter, another a 5-1 goal on the PP in a lost game vs. VGK), Matthews has not bore down on several breakaways or partial breakaways in this recent cold stretch.

A few minutes later, Chris Tanev showed a bit of rust coming back from his injury layoff by stumbling and turning a puck over to Carter Verhaeghe for a break down the wing, but Stolarz stood tall.

Benoit then made a good play defending Bennett off the rush to force him back and create a loose-puck race that Benoit was gaining an edge on, forcing Bennett into an interference penalty. On the subsequent PP, Matthews was immediately stripped of the puck high in the zone for a clearance. Nylander tried a shot off the flank that he fired well wide for a clearance, at which point Stolarz turned it over to Aleksander Barkov for a near shorthanded goal. The Leafs’ special teams just killed them in the first 40 minutes of this game.

7.   The lone five-on-five goal of the game for Florida came on a fourth-line shift, one of a few heavy forecheck shifts by that Panthers fourth line against the Leafs’ fourth unit. Five-on-five attempts were recorded at 34-22 for Florida after 40 minutes, but a huge chunk of it was attributable to the Leafs’ fourth line sitting 10-1 down in shot attempts through two periods.

This time, was Holmberg run off the puck in the corner, with Panthers outnumbering him in the puck battle. McCabe was spun off balance defending Greer’s initial rush, which made him late arriving to support Holmberg, as Greer collected the puck off the wall, got his head up, and spotted Niko Mikkola at the far point. Lorentz gravitated to the Panther in the slot as Benoit picked him up, and when the pass went through the seam, Mikkola had a ton of time in the high slot, with Lorentz scrambling to close down. Mikkola ripped it by Stolarz to make it 2-1 Panthers.

The game got further away from the Leafs a few minutes later on their second too-many-men penalty in two games. Laughton was changing off for Matthews and McMann for Knies, but McMann made a last second turn away from the bench to pressure a puck deep in the offensive-zone corner. Knies saw it happen, but instead of stopping in his tracks and hopping back on the boards, he skated into the play while attempting to signal back to Matthews not to change on (Matthews was focused on swapping for Laughton and was already on the ice).

8.   The Leafs were most of the way through the subsequent PK before conceding a goal that was far too easy. When Seth Jones fell at the point under pressure from Scott Laughton, Jones somehow kept the puck in from a fully prone position, as Laughton just wasn’t solid enough on it at the line. This puck should’ve been out, and the PK over with.

From there, a simple down-low play out front led to goal, as Benoit covered nobody. Benoit was seemingly guarding against a backdoor play that wasn’t there while Bennett stood all alone at the top of the crease to finish a short pass from below the goal line. This was a PP goal that had to feel like stealing for the Panthers as, by all rights, it should’ve been out of the zone, and it was so easy for them once they worked it low.

There was a lot of talk about this game as a playoff-like matchup, and there being nothing between the teams at five-on-five as the Leafs’ stars remained relatively quiet and Toronto’s special teams lost them the game was indeed a little too playoff-like for the Leafs in a haunting sort of way.

A notable part of the series loss to Boston last spring involved power-play goals against that were borderline gifts, such was the egregious nature of the coverage/breakdown by the Leafs’ PK. Lane Lambert and the staff have to get this fixed — especially knowing if the season ended today, they’d play Tampa in round one — or it may well feel like Groundhog Day again in a month and a half.

The PK is a much larger discussion than we have time or space for here, but we’re probably at the point where Benoit’s 2:07 of shorthanded ice time per game should be curtailed some, as he leads the team with 19 on-ice goals against when shorthanded and has frequently struggled with his reads. OEL has been far from perfect here, too, but bumping his time up some on a pair with Carlo to play behind the top pair of McCabe-Tanev is probably worth a try at this point.

As for Laughton, the first three games didn’t exactly go according to script for him, to understate matters. He seems like he’s a little disoriented by all the change — it’s his first trade ever, even going back to junior in Oshawa — and also badly wants to live up to the special opportunity/responsibility of playing at home for the Leafs. There is nowhere to go but up, and he needs to settle down and get back to playing his game the way he knows how without overthinking it.

9.   Down two goals, the start of the third period was just what the doctor ordered for the Leafs. On an early power-play opportunity, the top unit’s urgency about getting pucks to the net, recovering them, and the overall sharpness of their movement was much better than the earlier power plays, one Knies turnover aside. They hit a post on a Tavares tip off a Marner shot from up top, and Nylander fired multiple dangerous shot attempts. They didn’t break through, but it at least didn’t actively kill momentum.

It did the opposite, in fact. With McMann – Domi – Jarnkrok unit still on the ice after the PP’s expiry, the Leafs caught the Panthers on a bad change, as Jarnkrok bumped the puck to Domi in the neutral zone with some space and speed through the middle. He burst into the space and fired a low, hard shot into the far side by Bobrovsky from the top of the circle — one Bobrovsky normally comes up with, but a good example of the zip Domi can put on a shot when he wants to shoot.

After a goal within the first five minutes of the period, the push seemed to be on. Laughton was shifted over to the wing and up with Tavares and Nylander for his best back-to-back shifts as a Leaf so far; we’ll see, but there might be something to be said for a little time on the wing for Laughton as he looks to get his feet underneath him, as it alleviates some responsibilty and allows him to get into the mix a little more on the forecheck with his physicality, which could start to build some positive momentum and confidence within his game.

McCabe had a look from the slot, and Knies applied a really dangerous tip on a McCabe shot from the point that somehow caught enough of Bobrovsky to stay out. In the shuffle, Domi earned a shift up with Tavares and Nylander.

However, in the final five or six minutes, as Florida put the clamps on the neutral zone, the Leafs struggled to recover the pucks they put in deep, win enough battles, and get pucks off the wall into the middle of the ice. On one of their few half-looks in the zone, Matthews bobbled a puck when he went to shoot.

At the end of another ~22 minute game (19.5 for Nylander and Tavares), Matthews and Marner didn’t appear to have a ton of gas in the tank. The Leafs remain near the bottom of the league in goals with the goalie out with just three all season — stunning, knowing the offensive talent and history of production by this core at 6v5 — as this game slipped away from the Leafs without any real scoring chances of note in the final stages.

10.   Notably, the Panthers were able to generate one five-on-five goal in this game off their forecheck, while the Leafs scored two quick-strike, rush-style goals within a few seconds of breaking the zone. They didn’t generate a high enough volume of shots and chances off of their forecheck and cycle game against a heavy team that thrives in the trenches. The top line sawed off its five-on-five minutes against the Barkov line while creating few grade-A chances, and the special teams finished at a two-goal deficit. The Leafs lost a tight one-goal affair in the end. A playoff-style game indeed.

The Leafs have two more games against the Panthers and trail by four points with a game in hand; it’s all still in front of them to win the division, but they are not trending in the right direction with their overall game at the moment. We’ll see how the top line fares against Shane Pinto’s line this weekend (it didn’t go well for them last time out in Ottawa), but without a more dominant top-line showing/signature Matthews game soon, it’s getting hard to ignore the need to try something different to balance out the top three lines and hopefully, in the process, spark the team’s captain, who needs to be better than this if the team is going anywhere at all this spring.

Domi’s big game tonight is an interesting development because if he could parlay it into an improved stretch of play, it might make a reunion with Matthews a more tenable possibility.

Game Flow: 5v5 Shot Attempts

Heat Map: 5v5 Shot Attempts

Game Highlights w/ Joe Bowen & Jim Ralph

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