Ottawa Senators

TORONTO—A franchise's history doesn’t dictate its future, but when it comes to the Toronto Maple Leafs and their playoff record, the past has a way of lingering that makes you wonder if they need a team exorcist.

The Maple Leafs had the opportunity to knock out the Ottawa Senators in Game 5 of their first-round playoff series at home and prepare for a second-round date with the Tampa Bay Lightning or Florida Panthers.

Instead, the Senators took home a 4-0 win to force Game 6 back in Ottawa on Thursday and reintroduce the current Maple Leafs to the wicked spirits that undid Stanley Cup dreams of recent years past.

“We’re up 3-2 in the series, so I think we’re fine,” Maple Leafs defenseman Chris Tanev said. “We’re going to prepare for our game Thursday, and we’ll make the adjustments that we need to.”

The looming dread that surrounds the team from the fan base and certainly from opposing fans and everyone else around hockey isn’t something a new-to-the-Maple-Leafs guy like Tanev cares about or maybe is even aware of. But it’s there and trying to keep that and the past out of their collective headspace gets a lot harder when history, very recent history, is so hard to forget.

Not being able to put away a team when they’ve had the opportunity has been an unfortunate staple for the Maple Leafs since Auston Matthews arrived. They’re 1-13 in potential elimination games, which is a deeply negative statistic. If there’s a silver lining to that horrendous record, the one win came in 2023 in Game 6 against the Lightning that finally got the “haven’t gotten out of the first round since 2004” monkey off their back.

Leafs players have been unwaveringly confident about their talent and who they are all along, and that much hasn’t changed now. Even after past playoff disappointments when the question of whether or not they should break up their “Big Four” of Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander and John Tavares, their confidence in who they are and what they can do has been strong despite the repetitive results.

“It’s not supposed to be easy,” Marner said. “This is never supposed to be easy, so we knew it was going to be a challenge. We knew it was never going to be easy. They pushed back the last two games and now we’ve got to go back into their building and play our best game and we’ve been a great road team all year. We have confidence in this group.”

The Leafs have been road warriors this season, and their 25-13-3 record proves that. The flipside of that is how good the Senators have been at home. Ottawa went 27-11-3 at Canadian Tire Center in the regular season and staved off elimination there in Game 4 with a 4-3 overtime win.

With how raucous the home crowd was in Games 3 and 4, with the Leafs coming back to Ottawa now with pressure firmly in place, it’s a less-than-ideal setting for Toronto to try and stave off what would be a deeply foreboding Game 7 on Saturday.

“I expect pure insanity, that’s for sure,” Senators captain Brady Tkachuk said. “(The fans) know how important they are. They know how much juice they give us and how we just want to represent them well. When they’re buzzing like that, I can’t really describe yet how it feels for me and how it feels for this whole group and just the amount of energy we get off that.”

The playoffs aren’t meant to be easy, but the Leafs have been experts at making them difficult for themselves. Their effort in Game 5 was eerily familiar to past potential put-away games. The emotion wasn’t there, the desire to get to the net was lacking, the mistakes piled up, and when there were chances, Linus Ullmark snuffed them out and made 29 saves for his first career playoff shutout.

Even though the Senators are the team down in the series, momentum is on their side. The shadows and specters of Toronto’s past playoff failures are there to support it, too.

“You can feel great about yourself, or you can feel (crappy) about yourself as well, or the team or where you’re at,” Senators coach Travis Green said. “Those are the types of things we will talk to our team throughout the season. I think it’s paying dividends now, but again, we’ve won two games. We’re going to enjoy it now for a couple of hours and tomorrow reset. We’re going to have to play our (butts) off and play better in Game 6 to get another game down here.”

Back in 2013, the Maple Leafs infamously blew a 4-1 lead in Game 7 to the Boston Bruins before losing 5-4 in overtime. No one from that Leafs team has a role with the current team, but the last thing they want to do is create their haunting to replace, “It was 4-1…” in everyone’s memory.

“I think everybody’s fine in here,” Matthews said. “The playoffs, it’s a rollercoaster. It’s going to be ups and downs and it’s about staying as even-keeled as you possibly can and making adjustments when you need to. (It’s) just about everybody digging in, looking in the mirror and just being a little bit better.”