Both teams held serve at home, making this a best-of-three series.
Their 2-0 win — which was not as close as the score makes it sound — was Florida’s best game of the series, evening things up between the two teams. The good news for the Maple Leafs is they still have home-ice advantage in this series, where they are 4-1 in the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs so far. The bad news is that they have lost two in a row and are in search of something to get back to their winning ways. So much is hinging on Game 5:
Notable Performances from Game 4
We can broadly state that nearly every Leaf underperformed to some degree in Game 4. The Panthers solidly outplayed the Leafs, almost across the board. Natural Stat Trick has the Panthers down as owning 58% of shot attempts, 61% of shots, 68.6% of expected goals, and 66.7% of scoring chances at five-on-five, numbers that definitely agree with the eye test. When we factor in the edge in power-play time for Florida early on, this is a game where the Maple Leafs spent large stretches on their heels with the ice tilted against them as they struggled to break out of the defensive zone with possession or get much of anything going offensively. The game looked like too many of the regular-season meetings between Toronto and Florida, with the Leafs bogged down in the muck of the Panthers’ forecheck and their top players unable to break through.
William Nylander‘s shifts were not as frequently dominant or threatening as his primary line continued to be matched against the Barkov unit, but Nylander did fire four shots on goal (second on the team) and drew a penalty. Craig Berube was shifting Nylander around to different lines to find him more ice time away from the Barkov matchup as a way to jolt the team’s slumping offense; as a result, Nylander played the most among forwards at five-on-five.
In the third period, when the game was still 1-0, it felt like the only way for the Leafs to get even was if one of Nylander or Matthew Knies decided to tie the game themselves. It nearly happened when Knies sped away on a shorthanded breakaway in the third, but he fired high. On a night where his linemates were much maligned, Knies was his usual steady self and played a team-high 22:25 across the full 60 minutes, putting three shots on goal and dishing out six hits.
Mitch Marner logged a ton of ice time (22:10) but did not put a single shot on goal. Instead, he put a few shots into the shin pads of Florida defenders, who challenged him up high in the offensive zone, be it at five-on-five or on the power play. One led to a possible odd-man opportunity the other way for the Panthers, but Marner recovered well defensively to defuse the situation. Still, it’s not a great sign when some of his best moments are covering defensively for mistakes made in the offensive zone. In two games in Sunrise, Marner played 48:07 and did not record a single shot on goal. It’s just not good enough, and the same can be said for his linemate Auston Matthews (more on #34 in the next section). When Nylander is drawing the Barkov matchup on the road and Matthews-Marner manufacture just .25 expected goals in their five-on-five minutes against the Lundell line, it puts the Leafs in a tough spot to produce enough offense to win.
Outside of those forwards at the top of the lineup, there wasn’t a ton else going on. The depth was nearly non-existent on a night where we saw a very top-heavy allocation of ice time: the top five forwards all played at least 20 minutes, and no one else played more than 13:20 (Max Pacioretty). The Leafs spent the back-half of the game chasing a Panthers deficit, and it was more or less widely known that the rest of the forward group wasn’t giving them anything on this night. Max Domi took another reckless penalty, and Calle Järnkrok had one play where he came in on a one-on-one rush down the wing, passed up a shooting lane, and fired it into the defender directly in front of him. That play sticks in my mind because it sums up what the Leafs got from their bottom six in this game; i.e., a whole lot of nothing.
Defensively, the Leafs did a fairly decent job of holding the fort down. The territorial and possession battle was tilted against them for nearly the entirety of the contest, but as we’ve grown accustomed to with this team, they are capable of hanging on in-zone by boxing out and defending the critical areas to minimize what the opposition gets out of their zone time.
Oliver Ekman-Larsson took two penalties, one of which (the delay of game while already shorthanded) directly resulted in a goal against (the ultimate GWG). Simon Benoit buried Sam Reinhart with a thunderous hit while on the PK, but there were also a couple of sequences where Benoit struggled to get it out of the zone. The shutdown pairing of Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe was on ice for just their second five-on-five goal against in the series, and it wasn’t a particularly great look for the pair. McCabe badly misplayed the Sam Bennett goal in the third period that effectively put the game away, scrambling back to take away the same player that Tanev was already covering. Morgan Rielly played the most of any Leafs defenseman in this game, but he could not impact the game offensively as he did earlier in the series as the Leafs’ overall rush opportunity cooled off, putting only one shot on goal.
If there’s one legitimate bright spot from Game 4 — and it’s an important one — it was the bounce-back effort of Joseph Woll in the net. Of course, you can argue that if the Leafs had gotten this Woll on Friday night, they would have been up 3-0 in the series, but seeing that version of Woll appear at all is a positive indicator considering how shaky (at times) his performance has been in this series prior to Game 4. Woll was poised and confident all night, his only two goals coming on a (pseudo) 5-on-3 when a cross-seam pass by Matthew Tkachuk to Carter Verhaeghe gave Woll zero chance to make a save, as well as an odd-man situation where Woll was hung out to dry.
On the flip side, Woll made many excellent saves in every game state, be it five-on-five, shorthanded, or when the Leafs were on the power play and allowed dangerous chances against. He also was dialed in against the fluttering/bouncing pucks that haunted him in Game 4, remaining poised and confident throughout the game. Woll was the only reason the Leafs stayed within a goal for most of the contest. It would be a significant silver lining to emerge out of the Leafs’ worst performance of the series if Woll has indeed found his rhythm again.
Storylines for Game 5
1. The matchup game as the series shifts back to Toronto. With the series heading back to Scotiabank Arena, Berube will now have his hand on the steering wheel in terms of dictating matchups. That likely means we will return to the Matthews line matched up against the Florida top line, which will likely make life tougher on the Barkov unit offensively (who mostly got the Tavares line in the two games in Florida). There are two obvious trickle-down effects of this; the first and most obvious is that it will be a more challenging task to score for the Panthers’ top line, but it should also free up Nylander and Tavares to have easier matchups by virtue of not facing a line that features two of the best two-way forwards in the NHL. The Leafs need Nylander to get back to his dominant ways to surge back ahead in this series, and perhaps those matchups flipping around again is what he needs.
However, shifting matchups to make life easier for the Nylander line and harder for the Barkov line does mean that the Anton Lundell-led third line will have more opportunities to exploit the Leafs’ depth. The terror that the Florida third line inflicted on the Leafs during the two games in Toronto largely went away in Sunrise when Paul Maurice decided to deploy the group against the Matthews line, but if they are set to see more of the Leafs’ bottom six, they could pose a considerable threat. Before the series moved to Florida, the Panthers’ third line outscored Toronto 4-1 at five-on-five and owned 67% of the shot attempts (78% of expected goals).
2. Lines or lineup changes for the Leafs? The previous point assumes that the Maple Leafs’ lineup/line charts will look similar to what they have all playoffs. There’s no guarantee of that, especially when Berube was shuffling the lines a bit at the end of Game 4, giving Nylander shifts with Matthews. We will certainly see the usual pairings on the forward lines — they have been largely static all year — but the Leafs’ coach was seemingly tinkering with moving things around.
Even if the top two forward lines look the same, it is possible that the bottom six will not. Max Domi has been fined (but not suspended) for his hit on Barkov at the end of Game 4, but the two losses in a row may be cause for some changes anyway. Could Nick Robertson re-join the lineup on the Domi line to provide a possible goal-scoring jolt with the team coming off a shutout loss? There are two options on L3 Berube could consider swapping Robertson in for, including Pontus Holmberg — who, notably, he likes to use on L2 LW when the Leafs are in the lead — or McMann, who he will shift up on occasion when the team trails but is currently mired in a miserable nine-game pointless slump (minus-four). McMann has played less than 11 minutes in two of his last three games, and he has just two shots on goal (zero in Game 4) and three total shot attempts in those three games.
Berube has generally been steady with his approach to the lines all year, preferring familiarity, and in the playoffs, he has not overreacted to losses. However, perhaps the stakes in this series, the season down to a best two-out-of-three, and the scoring drying up in Game 4 will cause him to consider a change.
3. Marner and Matthews, and a lack of scoring. I mentioned a few paragraphs up that the Leafs need William Nylander to get back to where he was early in the series to win this thing… they also need Matthews and Marner to take their games up a level. Nothing has changed with Matthews’ goal-scoring woes since before the last game; it was another game in the books without one of the most talented goal scorers on earth finding the net. It’s now nine playoff games in a row against the Panthers without scoring and just one game with a goal in the last 16 (regular season or playoffs) against Florida. He has just three goals in his last 20 playoff appearances overall.
The Matthews’ conundrum will remain vexing and also devastating for Leafs fans until it turns around, which is why it was a bad time for Marner to also join in sputtering offensively. Critics will say that this is what we expected with Marner, and that’s why these next three games could be legacy-defining. Over his playoff career, Marner has almost always been stronger in the first four games of a series before shrinking to a limited impact offensively in Games 5-7. It is time for Marner to expel those ghosts and rise to the occasion alongside Matthews with a strong offensive night, pushing the Leafs to victory in Game 5.
4. Stay out of the box. Game 4’s narrative was defined in the early stages by the incessant penalty problems of the Maple Leafs. They were shorthanded four times in the first period alone, eventually cracking on the penalty kill when two of those penalties briefly overlapped. Another penalty followed in the second period when Marner was called for tripping while defending against a SH opportunity on the PP, and then a third-period penalty on Ekman-Larsson for dropping Evan Rodrigues without the puck put the Leafs on the kill again. In total, it was six penalty kills for the Leafs, a surprising lack of discipline and composure for a team that had demonstrated it so often against both the Senators and in the early games of the series against the Panthers.
The Leafs were never able to find their footing or get into the game properly because of that parade to the penalty box to begin the game, giving the Panthers copious opportunities right out of the gate. That’s what you want to avoid, even while the Leafs’ PK has generally played well the last couple of games. On the flip side, Toronto needs to be better on the power play. There was one strong PP in Game 4 (their first opportunity) where they held the zone and snapped it around, but later man-advantage situations were a mess, ceding as many (or more) SH chances as the PP chances they created. Stay disciplined, and make sure the power play is a momentum generator rather than a momentum killer.
5. The Leafs beating the forecheck and getting back on the rush. The defining story of this series before Game 4 was the manner in which the Leafs had come up with answers for the ferocious Panthers forecheck. Quick, effective short-area passing to facilitate the breakout and then a combination of chip-and-chase and stretch passes to cook Florida’s defense off the rush was the name of the game for the Leafs in Games 1-3, riding it to two wins (in a perfect world, it should’ve been three) and 13 goals scored. In Game 4, that source of offense was nowhere to be found for the Maple Leafs, and Paul Maurice recently suggested that he’s hopeful his team has found the right balance within the aggression of their “hard gap” system.
There were a couple of moments off the rush — the Knies breakaway on the PK mentioned earlier, and some partial rushes — but the Leafs could not break the Panthers’ press as easily and generated far fewer looks off the rush as a result. Their in-zone cycle offense in this series has only been so-so, and against a team like the Panthers that protects the net so well, the Leafs will need to really grind for the dirty offense and also be clinical with the rush opportunities they do create. It was inevitable that a premier team like the Panthers would adjust to reduce the sheer quantity of transition opportunities they conceded in the first three games. Can the Leafs adjust themselves and find a way to break through offensively as the series reaches its most competitively intense stages?
