Toronto Maple Leafs' John Tavares takes an elbow from Boston Bruins' Brad Marchand during first period action in Game 4 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup first-round playoff series in Toronto on April 27.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
As it was all going to pieces in the second period on Saturday night, the Leafs’ three amigos put their heads together to work out some problems.
Auston Matthews said something pleadingly at Mitch Marner. Marner held his hands out in supplication. Sitting on the other side of Marner, William Nylander fumed.
Deploying some amateur lip reading, Nylander appeared to yell, ‘Stop crying, bro’ – with a spicy adverb thrown in.
Marner leaned back and fired both gloves behind the bench. One and then, even more theatrically, the other. The players arrayed around him stared off into the middle distance.
Matthews didn’t come out to play in the third – coach Sheldon Keefe put it down to “illness” – and the Leafs got better.
By the end, the Leafs hadn’t just lost the game. Now down 3-1 to Boston in their first-round series, it’s starting to feel as though they’ve lost the plot.
Marner came out afterward to pooh-pooh the idea that there is dissension in the ranks.
“We’re grown men,” he said. “We’re not yelling at each other because we hate each other.”
Which begs a question – then why are you?
Afterward, Keefe caught sight of the bus that is headed toward his team and lay down in front of it.
“Nothing wrong with the effort level,” Keefe said. “Guys are trying. It’s a good team over there.”
That sounds like something a hockey coach would say. It may even be true. But if it is, it’s worse than a team coming apart under the pressure.
If this is the Leafs playing with sufficient effort, then how can they reasonably go forward with this group? They aren’t being beaten by the Bruins. They are being annihilated by them.
Once again, the power play was AWOL. Once again, the Leafs were killed by dumb penalties. In the third, just as Toronto was beginning to tilt the ice, Nylander decided he should jump on David Pastrnak’s back and try to ride him around the offensive zone like a pony. Momentum crushed.
Once again, they could not put pucks on the net. Once again, they were pushed around.
Once again, Boston’s Brad Marchand put his hand on Toronto’s forehead and watched while the entire Leafs roster swung at the air.
Marchand’s goal on Saturday made him the highest-scoring Bruin in playoff history. And that’s a lot of history.
More impressively, it was his 12th career goal in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena in the playoffs. Only Bryan Trottier has scored that many in one opposing arena.
Think about that – more than Wayne Gretzky in Calgary or Gordie Howe in Chicago. More than anyone in history.
Current totals:
Marchand: eight points
Matthews, Marner, Nylander, John Tavares: six points.
Has any player owned another team the way this guy owns the Leafs? If Toronto can’t trade for Marchand, maybe they should think about bribing him to retire.
“[Toronto-Boston] is right now the biggest rivalry we have,” Marchand said with a straight face. What a performer. He really can do anything.
Only one new thing happened all night – the home crowd booed the Leafs off the ice. That’s happened before, but they usually wait until the game is over. This time, the crowd jeered them back to the dressing room at the finish of the second period.
At the end, you waited hopefully for some flash of emotion. Something that tells you the Leafs feel something like what the crowd does. But no, nothing.
To tamp down the odds of an outburst, Tavares was brought out to do his cooler routine.
“We were just getting on the right side of it,” he said. Really. When was that going to happen? In the fourth period?
Once his career ends, they should send Tavares in to quell riots. Just give him a megaphone and both sides will be begging to give up and go home.
The captain seemed to crack only once, as he monologued about next steps.
“We just have to keep going,” he said, and then repeated that line, almost to himself.
I know that that’s what team captains are supposed to say, but nothing about the Leafs right now suggests they are capable of going anywhere but on vacation.