Maple Leafs bring familiar power-play woes to unfamiliar Round 2 territory

TORONTO — For a game unlike any the Maple Leafs have played in decades, a game their city has been anxiously craving for 19 years, Toronto’s first steps onto this long-awaited second-round ground felt oddly familiar.

The Leafs on the wrong end of a winnable game, a playoff series started on the wrong foot, and, by no coincidence, the blue-and-white’s star-studded power play coming up with goose eggs when it needed gold.

Tuesday night at Scotiabank Arena, where the home side dropped Game 1 of their Round 2 bout with the Florida Panthers, it was those familiar missed opportunities that, once again, stung the most.

“Offensively, for us, we didn’t get a whole lot happening at 5-on-5, I didn’t think,” head coach Sheldon Keefe said after the final buzzer had sounded on a 4-2 loss to the Cats. “Our power play, especially the first and third power play that we had, I thought we had a ton of really good looks, moved the puck very well.

“But we need to get one over the line. The power play could’ve made a real difference in the game here tonight.”

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Trace Tuesday’s loss back to the opening puck-drop, and even further, to the scouting report on both of these clubs, and the goose eggs weigh even heavier.

Coming into Game 1 of this new test, there was no question of the biggest imbalance that could potentially tilt the ice, and the series, in Toronto’s direction. Florida entered the post-season as the most penalized club still playing. Through the first round, they found themselves shorthanded more than any other playoff club. What’s worse, they were exceptionally porous during those frequent trips to the box, checking into these playoffs having allowed the most power-play goals-against of any team in the mix, and holding onto that reputation through the first-round.

For a Maple Leafs power play that finished as the second-most lethal in the league over 82 regular-season games — and then added a Conn Smythe winner to its top unit — this should’ve been an opportunity to feast. And five minutes into Game 1, Florida served up a silver platter: two early trips to the box courtesy of a Sam Bennett elbow and a Gustav Forsling trip — two chances for Toronto’s best to get their touches, feel the rhythm of the game, and put Florida behind early.

Instead, double-zeroes.

“Obviously it would’ve been great to a score a goal on one of those,” Keefe said of the early chances. “Especially the first power play — we were moving it really well, and couldn’t get it to go in for us.”

It certainly felt, in those early minutes, like something was building for the Leafs. A power-play deflection from Auston Matthews nearly went, then another from Ryan O’Reilly. On the next man-advantage session, another big shot from Matthews, blocked by Radko Gudas, and then a puck bouncing just an inch away from an open Matthew Knies.

They had the crowd roaring in approval, the momentum seeming to be swinging their way, even without them fluttering the twine.

But by the time the period was up, it had all been for naught, Toronto held scoreless and Florida drawing first blood just minutes after time ran out on the Leafs’ second 5-on-4 chance.

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“I thought the second half of the first period we definitely had a lull,” Keefe said of how the game turned on the heels of Florida’s penalty kills. “Which was partly a lull by us and partly [that] Florida went up a notch. 

“They did to us what they did to Boston.”

They’d get two more tries before the game was through, both arriving just when a Maple Leafs goal could’ve changed everything.

The next one came moments after Knies got Toronto on the board in the second period with a spectacular move for his first big-league goal — a power-play follow-up would’ve allowed Toronto to even the score at 2-2, in one blistering three-minute stretch. They didn’t.

The last came in the final 40 seconds of the game. The home side trailed 4-2, this one seemingly done and dusted. But an errant stick from Bennett that got the blood rolling down O’Reilly’s face granted Toronto one last, wild chance to reclaim Game 1. Thirty-seven seconds, double-minor, two goals down. A quick one in the cage, and you can bet the Panthers bench would’ve been looking up at the clock with a touch of worry.

Instead, the Cats closed it out, and Toronto finished 0-for-4 on the man-advantage, losing by a pair of goals.

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“I mean, we’re trying to score on it,” Mitch Marner said of the power-play stumbles post-game. “We’re trying to make plays. We did pretty well getting things around the net — we’ve just got to do a better job of getting second opportunities.”

His coach saw it the same way.

“One of the big differences in our scoring chances that we had here tonight, whether you look at power-play chances or the 5-on-5 chances, 6-on-5 chances, I thought we had a lot more tonight in closer to the net than we had in the previous series,” Keefe said. “You know, we’ve got to make good on those. There’s a lot of stuff in tight — we’ve just got to get it up and over.

“We’ve got to finish those.”

It’s still early. Neither of these teams need any reminding of how long a series can stretch, how much can change after Game 1. If there’s a silver lining for the Maple Leafs, it’s that Florida gave them the opportunities everyone expected them to — right from the jump, in fact.

And according to head coach Paul Maurice, we shouldn’t expect that to change any time soon.

“We have just accepted the fact that we will be in the box more than the opponent. Only because it’s been true the last eight games,” the Panthers coach said of his club post-game. “So, we just tell Sergei to get lots of sleep.”

Maurice made clear his opinion that the Panthers are getting tagged with calls they might not deserve as a result of their reputation with the officials. But the only path forward is to simply work through it, he said.

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“It’s something we talk about in the room — we’ve been doing it all year,” Maurice explained. “It was exactly like when I went into Winnipeg — it was a team that previously had barked a lot, about everything. We were that team last year. So, we’ve got to take it on the chin a little bit, to earn the reputation that we’re right men. We can accept that.”

Whether the veteran coach is correct or not, the result is the same for the Maple Leafs. They’re going to get their chances. The question is whether or not they can make good on enough of them by the time this series wraps.

The only problem is the roots of Toronto’s power-play woes stretch back further than the first period of Game 1. After dominating for much of the regular season, the blue-and-white’s man-advantage stumbled down the season’s home stretch. In Round 1, it was anything but consistent, capitalizing in key moments early in the series, but going cold late.

Even as Toronto broke its first-round curse and ousted the Tampa Bay Lightning, they had to do it in spite of missing these same opportunities rather than by taking advantage of them, the club going 0-for-4 on the power play in Games 5 and 6 against the Bolts.

Tuesday’s result extends that to three straight post-season games — and eight straight power-play opportunities — without a tally. Trace it back even further, to the beginning of the Matthews-Marner era, and the club has seen its power-play numbers drop from the regular season to the post-season in five of the past six years.

The same trend is holding true now. Against this team in particular, though, there’s little doubt the Maple Leafs will get every opportunity to rewrite that story, too.

Their next chance comes Thursday.

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