Opinion: The Leafs are supposed to have learned from recent playoff nightmares. Instead, they looked rattled, shaky, disconnected in Game 1 vs. Tampa Bay, writes bruce_arthur
Aston-Reese tried to clear a puck into a crowd of Lightning players, and theJustin Holl looked like an out-of-service toll booth as Corey Perry skated right by him and into the slot; nobody cleared Pierre-Édouard Bellemare in front and he knocked in the rebound, 78 seconds in. Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said Toronto was loose around their net all night.
You know what? Fine. How you respond is what matters. Yes, the pressure on this team is oceanic; yes, their past failures have eaten away at the organizational margin for error. But one lesson of the past six playoff failures was supposed to be how to deal with tough moments, right? Remember Game 6 in 2019 with Toronto leading Boston 3-2, and the Leafs responded to one bad break by disconnecting from each other for half an hour? They’re supposed to have learned from that.
“We’ve been here before, and we’ve been down this road,” said Tampa coach Jon Cooper. “To be honest, I look at this like, you embrace these moments. The atmosphere at the beginning of the game, and you’re going through the anthems, and the crowd’s going nuts, it’s a wonderful experience. It’s not something you should shy away from, and you talk to guys about that. Let’s embrace it.”
But this was a night to summon the demons. Kampf’s near-phantom slash led to Tampa’s Brayden Point on the power play, 4-2; Bunting was ejected for a sneaky, nasty elbow to the jaw of Erik Cernak, who was the third Tampa player to leave the game, and the second of their top three defencemen; Bunting was ejected, and a suspension is quite possible. Tampa made it 5-2 on the power play, then 6-2 with 0.1 seconds left in the second period.
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