Columnist image

TSN Toronto Maple Leafs Reporter

| Archive

TORONTO — This time, the Maple Leafs didn’t have it in them.

They’d already staved off elimination once in their best-of-five qualifying-round series against Columbus, with a three-goal comeback and overtime win in Game 4. In Sunday’s Game 5, the Leafs were trailing almost the entire way, and couldn’t manage a single goal of their own in a 3-0 loss that halted their postseason run.

"It's hard to put it all into words," said Morgan Rielly of the defeat. "It may take some time to digest a little bit, but it's definitely a bad feeling, a bad taste. Right now it certainly feels like it's hard to live with. I can't really put all my emotions into words."

This marked the fourth time in as many years that Toronto failed to advance past the initial stages of the postseason, and Sunday’s game was the second time in the series against the Blue Jackets that the Leafs’ offence came up empty. 

In all, Toronto scored only three even-strength goals the entire series, and hadn’t netted one since the second period of Game 3. Head coach Sheldon Keefe did what he could to ignite the offence, loading his top line with John Tavares, Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews for much of the night, but the results never materialized.

Because when the Leafs did manage to get past the Blue Jackets’ suffocating forecheck and collapsing defence, their chances wouldn’t drop. Tavares had a wide open net early in the first period and hit a post. Ilya Mikheyev rang a shot off the crossbar. Matthews hit another post, too.

"They did really well holding in the middle," said Marner. "When they get their lead, they just locked down in the neutral zone. I thought we had some chances, they just didn't go in."

Columbus was out front for almost the entire game on Sunday, when Zach Werenski’s shot deflected off Tyson Barrie and fooled Frederik Andersen less than seven minutes into the first period.

Toronto followed up by immediately getting caught with too many men on the ice, calling on a successful penalty kill to hold the deficit at one.

By midway through the second period, the Leafs were still pressing for offence when Barrie absorbed a hard hit along the boards from Boone Jenner that left him down on the ice.

The defenceman eventually skated off under his own power and went directly to the Leafs’ dressing room and would not return, leaving Toronto shorthanded even further on the backend. Defenceman Jake Muzzin was also not in the lineup, after suffering an injury in Game 2.

Keefe kept trying new combinations from there. At times he kept deploying Tavares, Matthews and Marner together, a trio that combined for 12 shots on net, and then opted to send Tavares out with William Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen. All of it was to no avail.

"We've obviously found it difficult through this series to generate offence and good chances and I thought that our best opportunity to do so would be to have [Matthews, Marner and Tavares] playing together," Keefe said. "I think we had good performances from some people. And we had a group of others that I didn't think performed at their best. That's pretty typical, it's pretty rare you're gonna have everybody going. I thought we had enough out of the people that were important, obviously, with the exception of the puck going over the line."

By halfway though the third period, while nothing Toronto threw at Korpisalo was finding mesh, Columbus finally capitalized on its opportunity. A bad line change by Toronto in the offensive zone set up a Blue Jackets’ rush, and 18-year-old Liam Foudy scored a bad angle goal on Andersen to double Columbus’ lead and put Toronto on the brink.

Keefe wasn’t as aggressive in pulling Andersen as he was in Game 4, leaving him in the net until two minutes remained in regulation, but Nick Foligno eventually added an empty-netter anyway to send Toronto packing. Andersen finished the night with 19 saves, for a .905 save percentage.

"There's lots of things that we would like to have done better, lots of things that I would have liked to have done better," Keefe conceded. "We really challenged our team coming into this to be better defensively, and give ourselves a chance and not beat ourselves. I think we did a really good job of that in playing a patient game. [But] Columbus defended very well, and didn’t give us much."

Even in creating Sunday’s lineup, Keefe had kept a hopeful future for the Leafs, albeit one that won’t materialize.

In a surprise twist, the Leafs welcomed Andreas Johnsson back to the lineup for Game 5 after he was activated from Injured Reserve that afternoon. He slotted onto the team’s third line in place of rookie Nick Robertson.

Johnsson hadn’t played since Feb. 13, when the winger injured his knee against Dallas and required surgery. General manager Kyle Dubas said last month he expected Johnsson to be available by the second round of the playoffs, but the winger felt ready to go ahead of schedule, and Keefe wanted him in on Sunday since Johnsson would have been playing in the first game of Toronto’s next series anyway.

"With what was at stake here today, we wanted to have him a part of it," Keefe said. "He's an important player for us and he's worked really hard to be ready to play."

In the end, nothing Keefe tried made much of a difference for the Leafs. They still ended the postseason after it had barely begun, and will now have a 12.5 per cent chance of landing the number one pick in the NHL Draft Lottery on Monday.

That’s no consolation to Keefe though, who’s a long way from forgetting how hard his Leafs fell in qualifiers.

"I'm obviously not focused on [the lottery] one bit, "he said. "But it's the next thing on the calendar for us, so we'll be pay attention to it. But I'll be thinking about this one for quite a while."​