What once started so promisingly is looking like another postseason of massive disappointment for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Maple Leafs haven’t made it to the Eastern Conference Finals since 2002. They’ve never won a conference finals series. And they haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967, when it was still just the NHL’s Original Six.
Recent years have been one early crash out after another, but it finally looked like the franchise’s fortunes were turning around when they took a 2-0 lead in their conference semifinals series against the Florida Panthers. But after losing both games in the sunshine state, the Maple Leafs returned home north of the border for a pivotal Game 5.
And they got smoked in their own building 6-1. It was actually 6-0 before the Leafs scored a meme worthy consolation goal with a minute left.
After the game, ESPN studio analysts P.K. Subban, Mark Messier, and guest Chris Pronger did not pull any punches about how bad of a loss it truly was for one of the league’s flagship franchises.
Pronger got it started.
“The lack of emotion that I see, I would be pissed off. I would be sitting there dejected, at a loss for words as to how we just laid an egg in the biggest game, as we talk about, the biggest game of potentially their careers. In that city with all the implications of what’s surrounding that team right now. The body language that we saw, the effort, their inability to stop the mistakes, they did not play a mistake free game,” the former Hall of Fame defenseman said.
Messier was equally as honest in his brutality.
“This was the worst performance we’ve seen in a long time in a game that had so many implications. Two things are going to happen going into Game 6. This was so devastating for the Maple Leafs that they completely quit on each other, themselves and each other, or it’s going to be so incredibly embarrassing for them as a team that they’re going to rally around each other, fight back, and come up with their best performance of the year. Whether they win or lose or not doesn’t really matter at this point. They have to come back and show some character in Game 6 because that was not a good performance by the collective, entire Toronto Maple Leafs team,” Messier said.
And Subban was already looking to the future in blasting the Maple Leafs like they were NBA superstars.
“They’ve had two series wins in 21 years. In the past 11 years, they’ve had one,” he said. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. And Brendan Shanahan has to be asking himself, ‘what do I have to do?’ But he also has to look at himself in the mirror. He’s gone out and acquired all these coaches, GMs, put these players in this position. It hasn’t worked out. I could be like everyone else being critical of the Leafs, but this was the biggest game for them over the last two decades. A 6-0 loss in front of your fans is embarrassing. This team’s better than that, this can’t happen. If they lose this series, there has to be a change. There has to be a change in leadership there.”
The Maple Leafs have had some brutal playoff losses over the years. But for these three hockey experts to be as strong as they were in their analysis tells you just how ugly the Game 5 performance ranks in their seemingly never-ending stream of postseason defeats.
If Toronto is somehow able to turn it around and win Game 6 and Game 7 against the Panthers to advance, it would be a miraculous feat given everything weighing on their shoulders. At the very least, it would set up somehow an even bigger gut punch to come in the conference finals.