Quick closeout would help Leafs slay playoff demons

Of course it was never going to be that easy.

The Toronto Maple Leafs don't do series sweeps. They don't even do almost-sweeps. While grinding through long series has been a hallmark of the Core Four era, with all of them going to a disappointing final game other than the blip of 2023, the trend goes back much further.

The last time the Leafs won a seven-game series in fewer than six games was in 1999, when they beat the Buffalo Sabres in five games in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. They've completed 20 playoff series since then. Even when they were quite good, with teams led by Doug Gilmour and then Mats Sundin, they never made it easy on themselves.

So if they bounce back from Saturday night's Game 4 overtime loss to the Ottawa Senators with a Game 5 win on Tuesday, they'll have done something very much against type: winning a relatively stress-free series.

They just have to, you know, win that game first.

The first four games offer reason to believe they can do it. The star forwards have been effective, particularly on the power play, and the Leafs have gotten surprising overtime scoring from Max Domi and Simon Benoit. The defense is much deeper than in previous seasons with the additions of Chris Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Brandon Carlo. And Anthony Stolarz has looked like the goaltender who seized the Toronto net in the second half of the season, a giant of a man who blocks much of the net just by standing there.

But this can only give Leafs fans a certain degree of confidence. When your team's whole thing is "losing playoff series in a heartbreaking fashion," a 3-0 series lead that becomes a 3-1 series lead naturally causes a twinge of concern.

And the Senators have hardly been pushovers. Now playing with house money in a series that no one expects them to win, they can be loose and comfortable - and, more importantly, they'll know that the longer they can keep the Leafs from asserting control of Game 5, the more tense the atmosphere at Scotiabank Arena will become. No fan base should really get nervous when its team holds a 3-1 series lead, but if there was ever a group that could be forgiven for those anxieties, it's Leafs Nation.

Even putting aside 2013's crushing Game 7 collapse against the Boston Bruins - which happened when Matthew Knies was 10 years old - this group has a closet full of skeletons. The Leafs suffered first-round eliminations in seven of the past eight seasons. And in the one season that didn't end that way, two years ago, they followed their lone series success with a complete flop against what was then an upstart Florida Panthers team. It was like they were so thrown off by avoiding an opening-round calamity that they immediately collapsed just to restore balance.

This year's team was saying all the correct things after Saturday's little stumble. Ekman-Larsson said the Leafs knew that finishing off a sweep wouldn't be easy. "I like our spot here," he said. NHL teams do win 83% of the first-round series they lead 3-1, according to WhoWins.

Coach Craig Berube said he thought the team played hard and didn't give the Sens many chances, and that was certainly the case over the final two periods of regulation as the Leafs gave up just four shots on goal. "The bounces go one way or another. I'm not too concerned about it," Berube said.

That's fair in the context of one series, which is the sum total of Berube's playoff experience with this franchise.

But he must know that the demons are lurking. The loss to the Senators was the 11th time the Leafs have failed to put away a team that was facing elimination, beginning with Game 6 against Boston in the first round of the 2019 playoffs. They won just one of those contests, Game 6 against the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2023. And three of those elimination-game losses came consecutively after they had built a 3-1 series lead against the Montreal Canadiens in 2021 ... a 3-1 lead like the one they hold now over Ottawa.

None of this should be predictive. The Washington Capitals just couldn't win elimination playoff games - until they did on the way to a Stanley Cup. The Toronto Raptors were infamously bad at winning playoff series until they started to do it regularly (unless, that is, they ran into LeBron James). Teams can suddenly shed their postseason identities.

But the Leafs haven't shed anything yet. Berube, Tanev, and Stolarz can shrug at the notion of Toronto's playoff burden because it's all new to them, but the big guns know the deal. They've let too many fish wriggle off the hook.

That's why an early Senators lead on Tuesday night would cast a pall over Scotiabank Arena.

When it's been 25 years since your team won a playoff series easily, you're conditioned to expect the worst.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.