Maple Leafs' Core 4 Era Ends With Another Playoff Failure and Bitter Disappointment

TORONTO – The toughest part of holding out hope for success is that sometimes hope isn’t enough.

For the Toronto Maple Leafs, the hope was that their incredible Game 6 performance, in which they rebounded from a putrid Game 5 stinker to shut out the Florida Panthers, would create a wave of momentum they could ride back home to finally advance to the Eastern Conference Final for the first time since 2002.

Hope didn’t show up on Sunday night at Scotiabank Arena and neither did the Maple Leafs as the Panthers stormed their way to a 6-1 victory in Game 7.

Toronto failed to advance past the second round of the playoffs for the ninth straight season. Despite wondering whether or not the “Core Four” of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares, who have been together for the past seven of those nine years, would need to be broken up in previous playoff failures, that time is at hand now with both Marner and Tavares due to become unrestricted free agents on July 1.

“I thought we were ready to play. I felt like we were in a good mindset,” Matthews said. “I just thought we had too many passengers (after the first period). We weren’t on the same page. They get a couple of goals and then we’re just chasing the game.”

If it were the first time this group of Leafs had been through a Game 7, it would be easier to understand the nerves they showed in the opening 10 minutes of the game. It wasn’t, though.

Sunday’s Game 7 was the sixth one Toronto has played in since Matthews arrived and the seventh since 2013.

The tense Game 7 triggered flashbacks to past failures and frustrations. Coach Craig Berube was seen yelling on the bench, as was Marner at his teammates.

Berube said his team has passion, but when it comes out in that light in that kind of tough situation, it makes the frustration they’ve felt in these tense moments all too clear.

“I don’t think the moment’s too big for them,” Berube said. “To me, it’s all between the ears, it’s a mindset. These guys are capable of doing it, you’ve just got to execute it and we didn’t execute it. We didn’t execute it in Game 5, and we didn’t execute it in Game 7. I don’t have an answer for that why, but that’s the bottom line.”

For Marner, a guy who grew up in Toronto and played junior hockey in London, Ontario, these losses should hit home even harder. But with an uncertain summer ahead after so many brutal losses, looking ahead even that far was out of the question. He called Sunday’s loss “devastating,” and if it was his final game with the Maple Leafs, it’s a bitter ending added to a long list of playoff disappointments.

“It’s meant everything (to be a Maple Leaf),” Marner said. “They took maybe a risky pick on a small kid from Toronto. I’ve been forever grateful to be able to wear this Maple Leaf and be a part of some of the great legends here, and able to wear this jersey. I’ve never taken a day for granted, I’ve always loved it.”

This season was the Leafs’ best opportunity to go deep. They won the Atlantic Division and after Carolina knocked out the Washington Capitals and the Dallas Stars eliminated the Winnipeg Jets, the Maple Leafs had the best record of the five remaining teams headed into Sunday’s Game 7. A win would’ve had Toronto in place to have home-ice advantage the rest of the way.

Unfortunately, home is where the pressure is the highest and when the series got tight after Game 4, the stress level skyrocketed with it.

“If you look at the heat this team catches, it’s actually really unfortunate,” Panthers forward Brad Marchand said. “They’ve been working at going at something really big here for a while and they were a different brand of hockey this year and they’re getting crucified and I don’t think it’s justified just because they weren’t able to do it. We’re a really good, deep team, too and that’s how things go sometimes.”

For as hated as Marchand is in Toronto from his time with the Bruins to now with Florida, he admitted he grew up a Maple Leafs fan. The irony of that is strong considering Marchand became the first player in NHL history to defeat one franchise in at least five winner-take-all games. Holding a 5-0 record against one team, you’d think would make everything even worse through all this, but things are as low as they can get for a team that’s been a perennial playoff team and Stanley Cup contender.

Just like in Game 5, the home fans booed the team for their play and showered the ice with jerseys and assorted garbage after Florida made it 5-1 in the third period. After nine seasons of disappointing playoff exits and two abysmal home games to close out the series, you can almost understand why the response was what it was. If there’s anyone who understands that, it’s Panthers coach Paul Maurice. He coached the Leafs from 2006 to 2008 and coached the Hurricanes when they faced Toronto in the 2002 Eastern Conference Final.

"When you lose a game like this, it’s going to be rough on them," Maurice said. "You go through a bunch of things that aren’t wrong, but they’re wrong because they lost.”

The Leafs are good, just not good enough to get through their in-division gauntlet and now they’re looking at an offseason that will seemingly bring about a massive change to the roster.

They changed general managers twice, and now they’re on their third different head coach, all while the roster’s top players remained the same. They are great players and are superstars in the league for a reason…but something has to give.

If the Maple Leafs are going to take the next step we’ve been waiting to see for nearly a decade, running it back one more time after running it back one more time for years is no longer an option and that’s maybe the most disappointing part of it all. It was supposed to work better than this, it just hasn’t.

“Clearly there'a levels that we’ve got to get to and growth we’ve got to have, but we did a lot of good things in the series to come to this point and have this opportunity,” Tavares said. “Unfortunately, we have to learn again.”