Despite a playoff run to date that’s had many wondering, ‘Is this team different?’ the Toronto Maple Leafs showed up for a pivotal Game 5 with their worst effort of the run, calling into question their ability to have any meaningful playoff success.
Toronto maple Leafs lost Game 5 on home ice in embarrassing fashion, falling 6-1 to the defending Cup champs and putting their backs against the wall for Game 6 on Friday night. It was the first game of the season where you can say with confidence that nobody had a good game, and head coach Craig Berube echoed that sentiment when speaking to the media following the game.
DLB TALKS FLORIDA PANTHERS
“I get it, we need our top guys to produce, but they’ve done a lot of good things up to this point,” Berube said when asked about the performance of the top line. “Tonight wasn’t a good game for anybody. Anybody. All of us. It was not a good game.”
One player who has had high highs and low lows in the series is Max Domi. He scored the overtime-winner in Game 2 against Ottawa, set up Max Pacioretty for the game-winner in Game 6, and scored a goal in Game 2 of the first round. His line has also been routinely caved in by the opponent, and he’s taken a number of unnecessary penalties. Slashes, roughing after the whistle, things to that effect. Berube told the media following the game that the lack of discipline is something that will need to be discussed.
“It’s definitely an issue that we gotta talk about, discuss, figure out what we’re going to do there.”
Unlike other losses during this playoff run, where the Leafs fell victim to a bad bounce or a breakdown of sorts, Berube had nothing good to say about his team’s performance in Game 5, and rightfully so. Florida dominated them everywhere, whether that’s along the boards, in the faceoff dot, on special teams, or in net. There wasn’t anything positive to take from the game to apply to Friday’s tilt, and Berube said as much in his postgame availability.
“There were a lot of mistakes,” Berube said. “For me, mistakes happen in games, but it’s the way they happened tonight. It’s disappointing, more than anything. We’ll be better next game, but it’s just disappointing for all of us, the way we came out in the first period and the way we played. That’s the biggest thing I take out of the whole game.”
The Leafs will face a do-or-die situation on Friday when they head back to Florida for Game 6. While it’s easy to predict they’ll show up with a better effort than they did in Game 5, they’ll have a tall mountain to climb if they want to win the series.
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