The Maple Leafs’ Ryan O'Reilly and the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Nikita Kucherov eye the puck during Game 1 of their first-round playoff series on Tuesday night. Kucherov had three points in Tampa’s 7-3 win.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Now that was something. Something ugly. Something terrible. And at least a little bit something unexpected.
The Maple Leafs dropped a stink bomb in the opening game of the playoffs on Tuesday. They were totally outplayed in a 7-3 loss to the Lightning at Scotiabank Arena that had fans booing the home team at the end of the first period and headed for the exits by the end of the second.
Ilya Samsonov allowed six goals on 29 shots and was yanked after 40 minutes. Michael Bunting was kicked out after he delivered a dangerous elbow directly to Erik Cernak’s head in the second. With the score 4-2 at the time it killed a potential rally and indirectly led to two goals.
Tampa Bay scored four times on eight power-play opportunities. Bunting, as always, shouted at the referees from the penalty box even as a replay showed it was inarguably a major penalty that could result in an injury from the National Hockey League’s disciplinary experts.
Cernak had to be helped off the ice and did not return; earlier the Lightning lost fellow defenceman Victor Hedman to an undisclosed injury.
The latter was not on the bench after the first intermission. The Lightning finished the evening with only four defenceman, against whom Toronto scored once in the final 20 minutes. It looked as uninspired in the third period as it had been inept before.
“It is a hard one to explain no doubt,” John Tavares, the Maple Leafs captain, said afterward. “We are disappointed.”
By the time journalists were let into the home team’s dressing room not a single player was at their stall. Instead a handful were brought in one at a time and spoke mainly in monotones.
“It is not what we wanted to see,” Samsonov said. Two of the goals he allowed in the first period came after he failed to control rebounds.
Asked which goals that he was mostly disappointed with he said, “Every one of them.”
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After seven long months of blood, bruises and sweat, Toronto marched into the postseason feeling good about itself. It finished second in the Atlantic Division, ahead of the Lightning, and beat them two out of three times in the regular season.
It is only one game in a best-of-seven series, but it was not a good start for a team that hopes to go on a lengthy run and exorcise demons of the past.
The Maple Leafs have been eliminated in the first round in six straight postseasons and have not won a playoff series since 2004. That is the longest drought in the league.
A little less than a calendar year has passed since Toronto routed Tampa Bay to open the first round – but the series didn’t end any better than the seasons before it. The Lightning won in seven and went eventually reached the Stanley Cup final for the third straight time where it fell to the Colorado Avalanche. It won the championship the two years before that.
A raucous crowd inside the rink and a gathering of tailgaters outside who braved flurries rang in the Maple Leafs’ latest attempt to win a single round.
“You have to use the pressure in the right way,” said 39-year-old defenceman Mark Giordano early in the day. “We are in a great spot here. There are going to be nerves and butterflies but usually when you have them you play better.”
Well, not so much.
The Maple Leafs got jeered by fans after a slapstick first period in which they fell behind 3-0 and trailed 6-2 after 40 minutes.
Tampa Bay now leads 1-0 with Game 2 on Thursday again at the rink off Bay Street. So much for home-ice advantage.
Toronto looked slow and disorganized at the start, got stuck in its own end, was beaten to pucks and allowed two power plays. At the same time they couldn’t dent Tampa Bay’s extraordinary goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.
The Maple Leafs fell behind barely a minute in when Pierre-Edouard Bellemare slipped a backhand past Samsonov on a rebound of a shot by Corey Perry. The Lightning went up 2-0 with 12:42 left in the first, this time on a wrist shot by Anthony Cirelli, again off another generous rebound.
It looked for a short while – very short – like Toronto was regaining a foothold but then T.J. Brodie got whistled for holding 51 seconds before the first intermission and Nikita Kucherov cashed in that power-play opportunity from 35 feet away three ticks of the clock before the first intermission.
Disgruntled fans got on the referees when the two infractions were called but penalties they were, the second a bear hug by Brodie of Steven Stamkos that preceded goal No. 3.
Followers were so frustrated that they raised a ruckus with the officials when Auston Matthews simply fell on his own. They chanted “Refs you suck” numerous times mostly without reason.
“I think the penalties that were called were penalties,” said Auston Matthews, Toronto’s star centre.
The Maple Leafs whittled away at the deficit and cut it 3-2 on power-play goals in the second by Ryan O’Reilly and William Nylander. But then the contest got away from them over a calamitous 5 minutes 30 seconds.
First Brayden Point, who scored 51 goals during the regular season, scored on a power play. Then Bunting got tossed for elbowing and with it a five-minute penalty was assessed.
Perry scored from close in with 2:04 left in the period and when Toronto lost an appeal for goalie interference, it was hit with a delay-of-game penalty. Point then scored on a backhand with one second remaining.
“I felt the goal we challenged was a backbreaker,” Sheldon Keefe, the Toronto coach, said. “It would have been hard for us to come back from for sure.
“I thought there might be a five- or 10-percent chance the call would go our way but we didn’t have a lot to lose at that time.”
After Ross Colton put the Lightning up 7-2 with just over 13 minutes to play in the third, Calle Jarnkrok got one back for Toronto just over a couple minutes later.
Joseph Woll played the third period in mop-up duty in Samsonov’s place.
Vasilevskiy stopped 28 of 31 shots to backstop the win for Tampa.
The Lightning struggled over the second half of the season but was all over Toronto from the get-go.
“I think they stepped up their level and we didn’t quite do that,” Matthews said.