Toronto Maple Leafs center John Tavares (91) celebrates with defenseman Luke Schenn (2) after Tavares scored the game-winning against the Tampa Bay Lightning during overtime in Game 6 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup first-round playoff series April 29, 2023, in Tampa, Fla.Chris O'Meara/The Associated Press
The last time the Leafs won a playoff series, their coach, Pat Quinn, used it as a motivation exercise.
“I really think we can play better than the way we’ve been playing,” Quinn said in April, 2004 after squeaking one out against the Senators.
As it turns out, no. They couldn’t.
Since then, the team has hired and fired five coaches, four general managers and cycled through hundreds of players. Nothing changed.
There’s a thought experiment in philosophy called Theseus’s paradox – if you gradually replace all the parts on a boat, is it still the same boat? For twenty years, the Leafs replaced everything over and over, but they were always the same Leafs.
On Saturday night in Tampa, just past 10 o’clock ET, the Leafs got themselves a new boat. They won a single playoff series, defeating the Lightning 2-1 in overtime of Game 6.
The hero is John Tavares, who seemed to do four or five complete circuits of the offensive zone before squeezing one past Andrei Vasilevskiy. Tavares signed a US$77-million contract when he joined the Leafs five years ago. He just earned it.
What did it for them? Luck, mostly, along with some pluck and a bit of selective hearing loss.
Looking back on it now, the Leafs people love to hate could not have won this series. They’d have found a way to lose it in five. This team is some new sort of Maple Leafs.
Playing against the most successful franchise in modern hockey, the Leafs brought their backup goalie and a crushing weight of expectation. It wouldn’t be true to say that none of their biggest stars had ever showed up in the playoffs, but they were the Polk-A-Roo of the NHL – we’d never seen them all playing together.
Toronto was absolutely clobbered in the first game of the series. The goalie, Ilya Samsonov, allowed six goals in two periods. Afterward, he gave an honest, vulgar description of his play. Then he was rarely heard from again.
Their agitator, Michael Bunting, pulled a Nazem Kadri, trying to decapitate an opponent within ten feet of an official and was suspended for three games. At the moment, more than a few people wondered if that was the last time he’d ever dress as a Leaf.
Right then, you knew how this was going to go – a lot of tough talk about new attitudes, followed by a week-long swoon as soon as Tampa put a shoulder into them. The Lightning were winning a series they looked only half-interested in being in.
The Leafs should have lost Game 3, where they trailed by a goal with less than a minute to play.
They absolutely should have lost Game 4, where they played ten minutes of a 60-minute game and roped back a three-goal deficit.
All of a sudden, it looked like the Leafs stars started a side chat on the team Slack channel: ‘shud we try??’
After a flat and affectless regular season, Morgan Rielly began imposing himself. And after years being told he was the next big thing, Auston Matthews decided to become the current big thing. It wasn’t that anybody did anything unusual. Instead, everybody did the thing they were supposed to be doing.
There were a half-dozen opportunities to wander off into the media thicket and begin hacking away. Should Samsonov be benched? Was Bunting a liability? Is Toronto tough enough? What does Tampa coach Jon Cooper mean when he says “manipulate” that way? Why do the referees hate us?
You could have easily seen the Leafs spotting a shiny object and running over to paw at it to the delight of everyone who loves and hates them (often the same people).
But Toronto didn’t do that. They refused to give the bad answer to the leading question. They didn’t go off on any rhetorical switchbacks about how much they did or didn’t care about losing. Nobody did anything kooky after a big win.
In a strange way, it was the least exciting series the Leafs have played in years. Maybe they should have a little think on what that means.
This victory will be celebrated in Toronto like it matters, because who knows? It might be 20 more years before it happens again. That’s statistically improbable, but the Leafs are sporting proof that numbers can lie.
All that’s concretely been accomplished as of right now is a retrenching of the status quo. Winning this round means Leafs GM Kyle Dubas can be re-signed to a long-term deal. (You could feel Dubas’ relief postgame where he looked like he was trying to tackle other Leafs’ executives to the ground).
It means nobody will be shouting at the executive to trade away some of the (Occasionally) Fab Four. No one will have to spend the entire off-season fretting about whether the next goalie will be more expensive and less good.
What this means for the Leafs is stability. Absent any calamities, you are already looking at the 2023-24 Toronto Maple Leafs. Whatever happens in the next round against Boston or Florida is icing on a cake that’s already done.
It’s a bit sad, actually. A great deal of the fun of covering and following the Leafs is the soap opera of it all, the constant upheaval, the giddy sense of disequilibrium. For now at least, that’s gone.
Now that the Leafs aren’t a basket case, what are they exactly? They aren’t bad, but they’re also not good in any provable way. They’re somewhere in between.
Matthews captured this duality in his initial postgame reaction: “This is a small step in where we’re trying to go. But obviously, this is a big one for us.”
It’s probable that even the Leafs don’t know what they are yet. Now that they’ve shrugged off history, they can start to find out.