Panthers praise Maple Leafs after Game 7 win

TORONTO -- The Florida Panthers understood what caliber of team the Toronto Maple Leafs were.

They understood it even though they eliminated the Maple Leafs in the Eastern Conference Second Round for the second time in three seasons, this time with a resounding 6-1 win in Game 7 at Scotiabank Arena on Sunday.

“This is a much better team than we played two years ago. Much better,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said of the Maple Leafs, who they defeated in five games in 2023. “This team is in that group of teams like ours, there’s maybe 11 this year, then there’s eight that have a chance. They’re one of those teams. You’re going to assign a whole bunch of character flaws that just aren’t true.”

They may not be, but the Maple Leafs are now 0-7 in their past seven Game 7s, including 0-6 since forwards Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander, and defenseman Morgan Rielly have been a part of the team.

Those four players have combined for just three goals in the six Game 7s (two from Nylander, one from Rielly). On Sunday, they didn't produce a point and were minus-8.

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

Marchand is in a unique position to evaluate the Maple Leafs' progression. By getting a goal and two assists to help the Panthers advance on Sunday, he became the first player in NHL history to defeat one franchise in at least five winner-takes-all games.

To many in Toronto, he is the Grim Reaper that often appears during the spring, even if Marchand himself doesn't see it that way.

“If you look at the past, I haven’t played well in Game 7s against Toronto. No one player wins anything," he said. "I’ve just happened to be part of good teams who have had the upper hand, but if you historically look at the games, I didn’t play well. It wasn’t me that beat them, it was our teams. Our teams have always been really deep and good, and I am fortunate to be part of a really, really deep team here right now. So, I don’t look at it that way.”

To Marchand's point, in his previous four Game 7s against the Maple Leafs while playing with the Boston Bruins, he had three points (one goal, two assists).

“Sometimes that’s just how dominos fall,” Marchand said. “In those games we get a couple good bounces and they were on the bad end of that.”

On Sunday, it was the Panthers who came out flying, outshooting the Maple Leafs 5-0 before Nylander got Toronto’s first shot on goal at 11:34 of the first period. The Maple Leafs recovered and were much better in the second half of the period, generating a partial breakaway from Scott Laughton at 14:32 and another breakaway from Steven Lorentz at 16:04, but they were both turned aside by Sergei Bobrovsky.

Florida then scored three goals in a 6:24 span in the second period, and the game essentially fell out of Toronto’s reach. It looked yet again like the moment was too big for the Maple Leafs to handle.

Maurice would not agree, though.

“We own the first 10 minutes of the first period, they owned the second 10 minutes,” he said. “If you flip it, you’d say, ‘Oh, they came out right.’ We came out right, they found the answer to come back at us. That’s the truth. We score the goal and it’s just a puck to the net. It’s so much closer than you think, but you are going to kill those guys and they don’t deserve it.

“Before the puck dropped tonight, there were five teams left in the NHL. Five, all of them capable of winning. The puck went our way tonight. That’s it.”

But that didn't matter to the fans at Scotiabank Arena. Much like in Game 5 on Wednesday, another 6-1 loss, jerseys were thrown onto the ice as the game wound down, with louder and louder boos echoing throughout the building, which began to empty out long before the final buzzer.

“When you see the pressure Toronto faces, and everyone is talking about the 20-, 30-year build up or whatever it is, you see the fans, they just beat the pressure into this team," said Marchand, who grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and admitted after the game that he grew up a Maple Leafs fan. "It’s got to be tough on those guys to walk to the rink every day and not feel that. You see the way the fans treated them at the end, like how do you not feel that every single day? When you go through big games, you realize which are actually big games and which are big moments.”

Considering Toronto has not won the Stanley Cup, nor been to the Final, since 1967, has not been to the Conference Final since 2002, and has won only two playoff series since 2004, the fan base is anxious, if not impatient, for success.

And for many, it is an unenviable responsibility to bear.

“What’s great for the League is hard for the Toronto Maple Leafs and their players,” Maurice said. “The passion for the Maple Leafs, the scrutiny that these men are under, is why everybody else gets paid so much. It’s a driver but there’s a cost to it for them. There’s a challenge. You can hit one out of the park here and you’re never buying lunch again the rest of your life. But there’s a cost for these guys, for their families when you lose a game like this. It’s going to be rough on them, and you’re going to go through a bunch of things that aren’t wrong but they are wrong because they lost.”