The Maple Leafs changed the way they play in the playoffs and lost because of it

It took eight disappointing years, but the Toronto Maple Leafs finally did it. After back-to-back 2-1 wins in Games 5 and 6, they achieved the platonic ideal of playoff hockey they’ve desperately longed for in the Auston Matthews-Mitch Marner era. They won The Right Way.

The Leafs played two “perfect” games. They won a close, tight-checking, defensive, grind-it-out slog-fest — the type of victory many previous Stanley Cup champions had to pull out of their hat at least once or twice en route to glory. They doubled down with a similar win two nights later. 

Everything the Leafs have done over nearly a decade has been in painful pursuit of that moment. It’s the moment they prove they’re the kind of team worthy of winning it all by mimicking how others had prospered. Year after year they slowly chipped away at their own identity, doing what had to be done to finally prosper.

The Leafs as we knew them had become difficult to recognize for seemingly all the right reasons in the name of “defense wins championships.”

Well, aside from one crucial detail: The same result as every other season; the Leafs won nothing. 

Slowly and agonizingly, the Leafs have abandoned their most potent strengths in favour of covering up perceived weaknesses. They’ve morphed into a bland, milquetoast team with a borrowed identity that prioritizes nothing but playing The Right Way to an extreme fault. And it was all for absolutely nothing, as it led them to the same place they always end up anyway. 

The ends did not come close to justifying the means — it just wasted a lot of people’s time. Most importantly, the entire prime years of the team’s core.

It’s not that the Leafs should not have prioritized their defensive game and structure after past playoff failures. There were legitimate concerns on that front that needed to be addressed for this team to make noise. The problem stems from how they’ve gone about it, an issue that’s been exacerbated over the team’s last two playoff runs.

“Safe is death.”

I keep coming back to those three words, a John Tortorella mantra born two decades ago when his Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup. It means aggressively asserting a team’s dominance knowing the risks are worth the reward for a highly skilled team capable of putting on relentless pressure to that fact.

The quote rattled around my brain throughout a series against the Boston Bruins where the Leafs averaged 1.7 goals per game — less than half of what they managed during the regular season. That’s a year after finishing the playoffs scoring exactly two goals in seven straight games. For this team in particular, it should be impossible.

That is, until you say those three words again and everything starts to click. 

After several playoff failures to start the Matthews and Marner era, everything comes back to playing it safe. 

The players they added, the players they didn’t; the players they kept, the players they moved on from —…