Maple Leafs might be better off starting the playoffs on the road. They sure didn’t feel at home in loss to Lightning
Toronto’s .346 home playoff winning percentage is last among the 15 teams that have played at least 20 home playoff games going back to 2016-17.
With the Maple Leafs four points behind the Florida Panthers for second place in the Atlantic Division, the modus operandi for the regular-season stretch run ought to be simple enough. Keep pushing.
The Panthers are in free fall, after all, losers of eight of their past 10 games. So the conventional wisdom says it only makes sense for the Leafs to use the final seven games of the regular season to do their best to sprint past the Panthers and earn the coveted home-ice advantage for their first-round playoff series.
Or does it? Home ice certainly hasn’t provided a discernable edge to the Leafs during the regular season. After Wednesday’s 4-1 loss to the Lightning at Scotiabank Arena, Toronto has reeled off one more win on the road than they have at home so far this season, while playing one fewer road game. With two more victories in their four remaining away dates, the Maple Leafs can break the franchise single-season record of 23 road wins.
That was one reason not to sweat the rough spots in Wednesday’s loss to the surging Lightning. It wasn’t optimal that starting netminder Joseph Woll gave up a goal on a game’s first shot for the third time in four starts and lost for the fifth time in seven games since returning from injury.
And, yes, there were plenty of defensive lapses in front of Woll that won’t be tolerable come the post-season. Most egregious: On the goal that made it 2-1, Tampa Bay centreman Brayden Point somehow found himself all alone in front of Woll with plenty of time for a leisurely deke, what with Toronto centreman David Kampf and defencemen Ilya Lyubushkin and T.J. Brodie scattered hither and yon.
On a night that included a handful of similar defensive lowlights, and Auston Matthews’s 63rd goal of the season on an otherwise unbeatable Andrei Vasilevskiy, here was the bottom line: From here on out for the Leafs, it’s not about winning the remaining seven regular-season games so much as it’s about getting ready to win a seven-game series.
There’s a difference between the two objectives. As Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe made clear Wednesday, pushing for home ice is not a priority. Being primed to thrive in Game 1 most certainly is.
No one is suggesting they attend the Jontay Porter School of Suspicious Professional Underperformance. But let’s just say that between now and the playoffs, walking the line between staying healthy and staying sharp is a lot more important than piling up points.
