Maple Leafs Bury 19 Years of Hurt and Set Themselves Up as a Legit Cup Contender | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats, and Rumors

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It’s all about perception.

If the Toronto Maple Leafs had ended a 19-year stretch since their last playoff series victory by simply defeating a lowly opponent that had barely qualified, it would have sufficed to get through the weekend before whispers about postseason mettle got started once again.

But this was different. A lot different.

When John Tavares skated from behind the net, whirled and spun a forehand shot from the left face-off dot that trickled through the crease and got behind Andrei Vasilevskiy, it was something more.

Because it was Vasilevskiy. Because it was the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The team that had reached three straight Stanley Cup Finals. The team that had hung two championship banners. The team that had erased a 3-2 deficit while eliminating the Maple Leafs just 350 days ago.

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Exorcising that sort of playoff ghost carries a little more weight.

For Sheldon Keefe, the fourth-year coach who’d torn up the AHL as a young hotshot but managed just an 8-11 record while losing three straight series to lower-seeded playoff opponents.

For Kyle Dubas, the analytics-driven GM who hired Dubas but whose own seat had heated up thanks to consecutive whiffs on deadline deals for Jake Muzzin, Jack Campbell, Nick Foligno and Mark Giordano.

And for Tavares himself, the Toronto-born kid who’d grown up dreaming of playing for his hometown team, took a lot of flack for the way he joined them after ditching the New York Islanders and had been the subject of mid-year criticism this season thanks to inconsistent play and a bloated contract.

It’s only the first round. There are 12 more victories to get.

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But you’ll have to forgive them if their celebratory hugs linger just a bit in the aftermath of the franchise’s biggest goal since 2004.

“For us, we’ve had some disappointment getting through the first step,” Tavares said on the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. “It was a hell of a feat. We talked about not being denied and finding a way.”

Among those who wouldn’t be denied? The stars.

The team’s other two eight-figure salary players—Auston Matthews and Mitchell Marner—combined for seven goals and 20 points (alongside Tavares’ four and seven) in only six games this time, after managing “just” six and 17, respectively, in seven games against the same foe last spring.

Among the others to refuse was an oft-maligned Ilya Samsonov, who locked in the starting role when two-time Cup champ Matt Murray was injured and outplayed the league’s best money goalie when it mattered most—stopping 31 of 32 shots overall, including 10 of 11 in a frenetic final period.

His series-long goals-against average and save percentage—3.14 and .900—were pedestrian at best, but they spiked to a far more respectable 2.42 and .919 after a Game 1 debacle on home ice, far superior to the 3.66 and .869 posted by the former Vezina and Conn Smythe winner in games two through six.

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But perhaps the biggest gold star goes to Ryan O’Reilly, the burly bearded forward who achieved his own Conn Smythe/Cup double with St. Louis and was bought to Toronto at the deadline.

Not only did the former Blues captain produce seven points in six games against the Lightning, he provided precisely the sort of old-school grind that a team frequently criticized for the collective mental strength, especially in high-pressure moments, that it seemed to lack.

Lest anyone forget, Toronto had been up 3-1 on Montreal before losing in seven games in 2021 and was up 3-2 over Tampa Bay before dropping two straight last season.

In fact, they’d held leads in four of their seven unsuccessful series (alongside 10 playoff misses) since last winning in 2004, including a 2-1 edge on Washington in 2017 (lost in six games) and a 3-2 lead on Boston in 2019 (lost in seven games).

So the scoring was present. The defense was sound. The goaltending was good.

What they needed was a heart transplant. Or at least a jolt to make sure it stayed beating.

That Dubas got O’Reilly and Noel Acciari for picks around the NHL Trade Deadline is almost criminal in retrospect and another acquisition made 11 days later—defenseman Luke Schenn from Vancouver for a third-rounder this summer—provided another Cup winner in the locker room, not to mention a steady blue-line presence who averaged better than 25 shifts per game in the series while ending it with a plus-six rating.

And with the mental monkey finally off their back, who knows?

Now that the generational objective of simply surviving a playoff round has been achieved, it’s hard not to feel that they’re playing with house money.

They’ll face the winner of a Game 7 between Boston and Florida in a second-round series that’ll start next week, and given a 3-0-1 record in four games against the Panthers it’s no guess for whom they’ll be pulling on Sunday.

But even the Bruins look a little less daunting after blowing a 3-1 lead of their own, and particularly after a Game 6 loss in which presumptive Vezina favorite Linus Ullmark allowed six goals on 32 shots.

And against a good team that’s suddenly more loose and confident than it’s been in years, it’ll be a lot harder to tell which one’s more prepared to make postseason history.