TORONTO — Wayne Simmonds quietly ducked his head into the Maple Leafs dressing room, undetected by nearly all of the 31 reporters and camera people focused on Leafs captain John Tavares fighting for the right words. Only 13 days earlier, the Leafs forward literally skipped with glee down the hall in Amalie Arena, celebrating his team’s first series win in 19 years.
But as the clock slowly pressed toward midnight, Simmonds could only take what could be one last look at his dressing room stall before turning and exiting. He left a room wrought with sadness and instability, as Simmonds will likely be one of many Leafs who will see their time in Toronto come to a close.
Friday’s wild 3-2 overtime loss could end up marking the end of an era for arguably the most talented but equally disappointing core in franchise history.
This is the beginning of the end for the Leafs as we know them: https://t.co/8FjYz4geoa
— Jonas Siegel (@jonassiegel) May 13, 2023
After defeating the Lightning and winning a playoff series and then not having the Bruins standing in their way, the Leafs could see the road toward their ultimate goal. But instead, an upstart Panthers team stopped the Leafs dead in their tracks.
“We believe we had a team good enough to win the Stanley Cup,” Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe said. “We didn’t do that.”
These are the scenes of anger and sadness from the end of a series that could very well alter the future of the franchise.
The Leafs lost a must-win Game 3 in Florida and for the third game in a row had scored a measly two goals. How did a Leafs team known for producing offence continue to come up short in the first three games of the series, pushing them to the brink?
How did a season that seemed so promising just days earlier now feel like it was on the brink of collapse and ultimately, failure?
Yes, the Leafs won Game 4, forcing the series back to Toronto and providing fans with a glimmer of hope. But hope was ultimately as fleeting.
“We lost the series in the first three games,” Keefe said conclusively after Game 5.
The Leafs returned from Florida with the intention of maintaining a sense of unity as the world around them seemed to be collapsing. They had spent time together on the beach in Fort Lauderdale and held plenty of talks about what went wrong and how to rescue their season. The team opted to continue those kinds of conversations and stay together in a hotel in Toronto ahead of Game 5 at home to maintain that sense of unity.
As warmups concluded on Friday night, Mitch Marner was the last one off the ice per usual, and after he flipped his last puck into the crowd, he skipped off the ice and to a waiting Leafs vice president of media relations, Steve Keogh, who immediately threw a set of headphones on him to fulfill the team’s pregame availabilities with rightsholders.
Above the rink, Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas was joined by the same people who often join him high above the ice including assistant general managers Brandon Pridham and Ryan Hardy and special assistant Jason Spezza.
Dubas appeared light and buoyant pregame, laughing with Hardy. As the anthem kicked in, he stood alone, his back up against the wall, staring at a screen, while his associates took their seats.
What they saw was Panthers defenceman Aaron Ekblad get on the board with an early first-period goal. As the first period wore on, the Leafs continued their momentum, firing quick shot after shot on Sergei Bobrovsky. This only allowed him to grow into the game.
But when Panthers defenceman Radko Gudas took an interference penalty and skated to the penalty box, he smashed his stick off the glass in anger. It felt, for a moment, like the fault lines in the Panthers’ game were being exposed.
Just three minutes later, the Leafs showcased their own fault lines when Timothy Liljegren misplayed a puck in the neutral zone. On the ensuing three-on-two, Carter Verhaeghe fired the Panthers’ second goal past Joseph Woll. The proverbial nail inched closer to the coffin. The Leafs often held onto the puck for a split second longer, or perhaps made one extra pass, than those inside Scotiabank Arena thought they should have. As the game wore on, the case that some of the Leafs looked hesitant became stronger.
The sound of the first intermission horn saw Panthers forward Sam Bennett trying to engage Tavares in some late physicality. Tavares could only push the Panthers forward off with one hand and look out into the empty ice in front of him.
The Leafs did, to their credit, come back to life in the second period, led by the team’s emotional leader and longest-serving player, Morgan Rielly. The defenceman had one of the games of his life, making an impact with his smooth skating on every shift as he tried to tip the scales in the Leafs’ favour.
“We need a mistake made by the guys in white,” Leafs radio play-by-play voice Joe Bowen said on the radio broadcast.
Seconds later, Rielly lobbed a shot from the point through traffic. No Panther could accurately block the shot and it found its way through Bobrovsky. The Leafs had reason to believe.
In the days after going down 3-0 to the Panthers, Rielly insisted the two days off after Game 3 helped his team find belief in their future. He talked to friends, family members and former players who believed in him.
“There’s a million stories out there of teams who have come back, beaten adversity and not just athletes,” he said.
And man, in Game 5, did Rielly ever project the image of that belief.
As Panthers defenceman Marc Staal leaned on the ice to block a Rielly pass, the puck bounced off Staal’s ear. Staal crashed into the boards as the Leafs maintained possession before a referee’s whistle, perplexingly, blew the play dead. No penalty was called on the play. As Rielly smashed his own stick off the glass in anger, Dubas echoed Rielly’s sentiment, standing out of his chair and jutting his reddened face out to scream at the ice below.
The Leafs GM’s words were indistinguishable, but the emotion he projected was the one that would soon be shared by every Leafs fan in attendance: unconditional anger.
Rielly looked to have taken the Leafs on his back late in that second as he darted toward the Panthers’ goal and, to almost everyone watching, stuffed the puck past Bobrovsky. There was some confusion, but not from Rielly. He believed. The game appeared to be tied.
But when the referees and linesmen gathered together on the ice, a feeling of impending dread that Leafs fans had become accustomed to began to emerge. For minutes on end, they discussed whether the goal should count, despite clear evidence on the screens hanging above the ice that the puck had crossed the line.
On that controversial no-goal: https://t.co/1mDyHwJCSV
— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) May 13, 2023
As the minutes crept on, Dubas’ face grew darker shades of red. He pointed in multiple directions, wherever there was evidence on a screen of the puck crossing the line. The amount of four-letter curse words heard from Dubas’s box began to multiply.
“It’s right there,” he screamed to no one in particular, before a familiar phrase of frustration: “Jesus f—— Christ.”
What, exactly, was being debated, many wondered? The puck was clearly over the line.
What wasn’t clear, however, was when the referees had deemed the play dead. Keefe would later say that the explanation he received was that there was not “a clear and conclusive view of the initial shot showing it was in.”
This might have been the correct call according to the letter of the law, but most of the 19,513 fans in attendance wanted no part of any explanation. Beer cans, plastic cups, hats and white towels that seemed surprisingly heavy in the moment littered the ice. Uniformed calls of “bulls—” rang out throughout the arena.
The early villain in the series, Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk, had been replaced by an all-too-familiar one: the NHL officials. Leafs fans had a blame-worthy enemy, and as the third period began, it was clear no one in a blue sweater was feeling sorry for themselves.
Michael Bunting smashed his stick on the glass above the boards at a questionable icing call. A simple “F— you!” from an undetermined person emerged from the box housing the Leafs executives.
This was the emotion the Leafs could be accused of lacking at times in the series. But this was the emotion evident from William Nylander as he barreled past the Panthers defence, snuck a shot past Bobrovsky and, when his face was shown to Leafs fans on the big screen, waved his hands and uttered a curse word of his own to rally any fans watching.
With all nine of the shots the Leafs, unquestionably the better team on the night, fired in overtime, it felt like Game 6 in Florida looked more and more likely. Spezza offered more and more chatter with every play. Hardy kept his head in his hands.
But with the last shot of the game at 15:32 in overtime, Panthers centre Nick Cousins’s goal ensured hope was lost for good on the Leafs season.
Keefe elected not to address his team after the loss, leaving the continued sadness to hang heavy in the dressing room.
“In all of my years of coaching, this is not a time when they are hearing much of what you are saying. It is a very dejected group. They left it all out there,” Keefe said. “We would love to still be playing. There is nothing to be said here at this point.”
Outside a closed and sombre Leafs dressing room, Toronto Argonauts legend Michael “Pinball” Clemons stood in an Auston Matthews jersey. His beaming, constant smile might have been the only one in sight.
As Opus’ 1984 classic “Live is Life” rung out from the Panthers dressing room, Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment chairman Larry Tanenbaum walked alone in a black leather Leafs jacket, cutting through reporters with his head down and a gaze fixed on nothing in particular. He, presumably, had lots on his mind.
Inside the Leafs dressing room, Tavares was standing, waiting to address the media with resolute, forward-looking thoughts after a loss as he often does. But this time, the normally stoic captain fought for words.
“The belief never wavered,” Tavares said, “but, it’s hard to believe it’s over.”
One by one, the Leafs’ core came to make sense of what had just happened.
“We dug ourselves in a bit of a hole there,” Matthews said, his blue Leafs hat pulled down a little lower than usual. “It was all stuff on us, shooting ourselves in the foot at times.”
“When we got our (chances), we weren’t always able to bury them,” Rielly said.
Brendan Shanahan stood and watched from just outside a door into the dressing room.
And Dubas went from side room to side room, greeting equipment staff and trainers with handshakes. Eventually, the two people at the top of the food chain in the Leafs organization met beside a table of food neither seemed all that interested in for a brief conversation. Dubas held his palm up as he spoke to Shanahan, bewilderment evident.
Because with the Leafs’ offseason now underway, few can accurately predict what comes next after the bewilderment.
Outside of the dressing room, two police officers guarded a set of doors. Behind those doors, players slowly filtered out of the dressing room to waiting friends and family members. One of the last few fans in the arena made their way past large clear plastic bags filled with uneaten popcorn and into an unseasonably warm Toronto night.
Before he did, he slowed in front of the police officers to make a point made before, but this time, felt a little less believable.
“Next year,” he said, “is the year.”
(Top photo: Gavin Napier / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiR2h0dHBzOi8vdGhlYXRobGV0aWMuY29tLzQ1MTYwNTcvMjAyMy8wNS8xMy9tYXBsZS1sZWFmcy1wYW50aGVycy1nYW1lLTUv0gFNaHR0cHM6Ly90aGVhdGhsZXRpYy5jb20vNDUxNjA1Ny8yMDIzLzA1LzEzL21hcGxlLWxlYWZzLXBhbnRoZXJzLWdhbWUtNS8_YW1wPTE?oc=5
2023-05-13 06:42:53Z
2018856920
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar