Lifeless Maple Leafs on the Verge of Franchise-Altering Change

TORONTO — It's hard to imagine what it's like to be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.

You love, live and die with a team including some of the NHL's best talent. Auston Matthews. Mitch Marner. William Nylander. John Tavares. And Morgan Rielly is a great weapon on the blue line.

With all of that going for them and the chance to take control of their second-round series against the Florida Panthers on home ice, the Maple Leafs delivered one of the ugliest performances in recent playoff memory as the Panthers left them on the brink of elimination with a demonstrative and clinical 6-1 win in Game 5.

"I don't think they came in harder than they have, I think we let them come tonight," Maple Leafs coach Craig Berube said. "We stood around and watched and we can't do that."

The Panthers took a 1-0 lead and outshot the Maple Leafs 13-6 in the first period. Things snowballed in the second. Dmitry Kulikov, Jesper Boqvist and Niko Mikkola each scored their first goal of the playoffs and bulged the lead to 4-0. That kind of effort led to the fans at Scotiabank Arena booing their team at the end of 40 minutes.

Somehow, it got worse in the third.

A.J. Greer put a loose puck that struck Jake McCabe in the face past Woll that made it 5-0 and chased Woll from the game, mercifully. A fan threw their Matthews jersey on the ice in disgust after that.

When Sam Bennett made it 6-0 with a power-play goal past backup Matt Murray, another shirt hit the ice shortly afterwards. Those that didn't lose their shirts just left. If you forget how much the jerseys cost, you can understand the sentiment.

"I don't think we gave them much reason to stick around," Matthews said.

Ever since the start of the Matthews era, the expectations for the Maple Leafs went from "just get to the playoffs" to "it's time to win the Stanley Cup" because making the playoffs became the norm.

After getting knocked out in the first round repeatedly, Toronto reached the second round for the second time since 2016 this year but now it's poised to exit the playoffs at that point again.

"We've got to put our best foot forward, look ourselves in the mirror and just be better," Maple Leafs captain Matthews said. "Everybody wants to be better. Everybody wants to win."

The issues that appeared too often in a crummy 2-0 loss in Game 4 in Sunrise got exponentially worse in Game 5. The Panthers hemmed the Leafs into their end of the ice by winning puck battles repeatedly. Toronto helped Florida by turning the puck over constantly, making poor decisions with it, and compounded those problems with careless passes through the middle of the ice.

A reckless blind pass by Marner midway through the second period wound up on Sam Reinhart's stick for a rush the other way that, at the end of it, saw Boqvist score his first career playoff goal.

"I'm not going to look at a certain group of players; it's everybody, myself included," Berube said. "There were mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and for me, mistakes happen in games. It's the way they happened tonight that's disappointing more than anything. We'll be better next game, but it's just disappointing for all of us here the way we came out in the first period and played."

No Maple Leafs player can be absolved from blame. Unless Toronto has a "we're sick and tired of being sick and tired" moment, this series may well be (and arguably should be) the last time we see Marner and Tavares, both due to be unrestricted free agents this summer, wear blue and white.

"I don't think anyone was happy about it," Marner said. "Time to reset, refocus and be ready for our flight (Thursday) and go into Florida and win a hockey game."

The problem with being better next game is that they were supposed to be better in Game 5 than they were in Game 4.

After all, they just accomplished that in the first round against the Ottawa Senators when they had a chance to put the series away in Game 5. That they played much better in Game 6 to end the series seemed to show that maybe things would be different this year for Toronto. They’ll have to recreate that again this time around, only the opponent isn't an upstart young team back in the playoffs for the first time in years; it's the defending Stanley Cup champions.

In Wednesday's Game 5, the terrible tone Toronto set in the first period had a hangover effect into the second. It's one thing to get beat, it's another to get beat in every facet of the game. If it wasn't all so familiar, you could chalk it up as the Maple Leafs getting beaten down by a superior team and they'll get 'em again next season.

But this isn't anything new. It's happened to Toronto before. Repeatedly. Heck, it happened to them two years ago when the Panthers knocked them out of the second round in five games.

"They owned us today, we've got to try and do that to them in Florida," Nylander said.