Opinion | These Maple Leafs are who we thought they were — a failed experiment not built for the playoffs

If it’s Toronto and it’s hockey, it always seems to come back to this. A little more than a week since being celebrated as conquering heroes, their fans parading in the streets, the Maple Leafs are once again NHL laughingstocks.

You know why. They’re down 3-0 in their second-round series to the Florida Panthers after Sunday night’s comically inadequate performance in South Florida. After winning a playoff series for the first time in more than 19 years, they’ve landed with a splat against a new historic brick wall. Barring the stuff of miracles — and just four of the 203 teams that have found themselves in a three-nil hole have come back to win a series — it’ll be 21 years and counting since the Maple Leafs advanced beyond round two.

Just when everyone wanted to believe the Leafs were actual contenders — it was a scant few days ago when they were Stanley Cup betting favourites — they’ve yet again confirmed themselves as perennial pretenders.

But let’s not pretend we’re surprised. Again and again, year after year, we’ve seen a team built around this same Core Four fall flat in eerily similar ways. We’ve seen a team that looks good on paper repeatedly show all the fortitude of a wet paper bag.

And again and again, we’re reminded of a truth Toronto’s front office forever ignores: Playoff hockey is a different sport. And these Maple Leafs, as constructed, aren’t very good at it.

That’s not to overreact to Sunday’s grim loss, even it was unconscionably pathetic and emblematic of the Auston Matthews-Mitch Marner era. And it certainly doesn’t overlook Toronto’s success in the first round against Tampa, which actually happened and at least gave long-suffering fans a spoonful of sugar before the annual dose of poison.

But this seems like a good moment to remind ourselves of the hard-and-fast playoff numbers of the Shanaplan era.

In defying NHL convention by building a team around four skilled forwards — overlooking other fundamental components of historically successful Cup teams by capped-out necessity — the Maple Leafs have enjoyed plenty of regular-season success, to be sure. Over these seven seasons in which Matthews and Marner have been Toronto’s top players, Toronto counts itself among just 15 NHL franchises that have played at least 40 playoff games. That’s a good thing.

What isn’t so good is that, among those 15 franchises, the Maple Leafs rank 15th in playoff winning percentage. That’s dead last. They’ve won just 20 of 48 playoff games with Matthews and Marner driving the bus. That’s .417 hockey. When you consider the Leafs have won just 14 of those games in regulation — well, that’s a regulation win percentage of 29 per cent in the post-season. Which is not exactly a number that suggests they’re on the precipice of a post-season breakthrough.

Not that anyone is doubting they might still make a series of this. These Leafs seem to perform their best when they’ve been written off, when nobody’s expecting anything.

But nothing that happens from here is likely to change the big picture. The sample size is no longer small. We’ve seen enough to know the Maple Leafs are what their record says they are. They’re simply not built for the playoffs, when talent can be overcome by tenacity, when iron will so often mutes even the most majestic of skill.

It’s not just the shocking lack of passion expressed during and after Sunday’s no-show that’s problematic. It’s that the loss was the fifth straight playoff game in which the Leafs have scored precisely two goals. That’s the output of a team built around defence, not four offence-first prodigies. None of Matthews, Marner, John Tavares and William Nylander has scored so much as a goal in the series. And don’t get it wrong: The Leafs are not being frustrated by some defensive behemoth. The Panthers ranked 21st in defence this season as measured by goals-against average, the worst mark of any playoff team. Against the Bruins in the first round, the Panthers gave up nearly as much as they got.

Sunday would hardly be the first time the key Leafs have shot blanks in a must-win game. Last year, holding a 3-2 series lead against the Tampa Bay Lightning, they found a way to blow a third-period lead in Game 6 before scoring precisely one goal in a Game 7 loss. Two years ago, in blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Montreal Canadiens, Matthews and Marner combined for one goal in the debacle. The year before that, the Leafs followed up a spirited comeback win in Game 4 against Columbus by getting shut out in a winner-take-all Game 5. The year before that, up 3-2 in a series against the Boston Bruins, the Leafs combined to get outscored 9-3 in losses in Games 6 and 7.

The failures keep piling up. Maybe what’s most alarming: The Leafs never seem to express an ounce of shame as they shrug them off. On Sunday nobody in a Leafs sweater pronounced the Game 3 laydown as “unacceptable.” Nobody said: “It’s on me. I need to be better.” Matthews, the best player on the team, seemed to chalk up perhaps the worst performance of the past seven years to sheer puck luck.

“Sometimes it goes in, sometimes it doesn’t,” Matthews said.

But Sunday wasn’t about the vagaries of shooting percentage. It was just another piece in the pileup of evidence that the Maple Leafs have shot themselves in the organizational foot by doubling and tripling down on a forward-centric roster construction that leaves obvious cracks in the foundation. This is what happens when you chase a bad bet.

Year after year, we’ve watched true Cup-contending teams raise their games while the Maple Leafs seem mostly unequipped for the rockier terrain.

Year after year, team president Brendan Shanahan has offered a self-assured smile and an insistence that things will improve.

The realists have documented Toronto’s repeated and alarming failure. Shanahan has insisted it’s a healthy and continuing evolution.

The realists have pointed out that the Leafs, built around four mild-mannered guys who express their genius best on a regular-season scoresheet, have lacked any semblance of killer instinct. Shanahan has insisted it could be developed.

The realists have observed a team bereft of guts. Shanahan has insisted they’d grow some, that the nucleus he and GM Kyle Dubas put together would learn and adapt and succeed.

Not everyone does business the same way. Last year the Panthers saw a Presidents’ Trophy-winning team fall flat in the playoffs and decided they needed a playoff-worthy competitor at their beating heart — thus the trade that swapped out Jonathan Huberdeau for Matthew Tkachuk. Thus the team that’s currently got the Maple Leafs by the throat.

Toronto, rather than make a bold change to the team’s heart, have bet on changing the outcome by nibbling around the edges. They’ve hired the best sports psychologists. They’ve hired assistants to assistants to assistant performance coaches. They’ve brought in a rotating cast of playoff-proven role players to theoretically inject some know-how into the mix.

The theory isn’t holding. The experiment is a failure. Playoff hockey is a different sport, and the Leafs aren’t very good at it. The centre can no longer hold. At some point, somebody with some sense needs to insist that the busted, stubborn gambler who keeps chasing the same bad bet kindly steps away from the table.

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