“They have demons. Demons in their cars. Demons in their heads. Demons under the bed. Everywhere they look is a f——‘ demon!” —Paul MacLean, former Maple Leafs assistant coach, 2021
OTTAWA — The worst collapse and most favourable playoff path for these Toronto Maple Leafs (until proven otherwise) took place four years ago. It was documented inside and out by embedded Amazon Prime cameras.
With all due respect to Sheldon “This Is the Time!” Keefe, Joe “We’re in First Place” Thornton, and Frederik “Is He Skating?” Andersen, the most resonating scene in All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs belonged to assistant coach Paul MacLean, who drove at the heart of the problem as things began to fall apart against the underdog Montreal Canadiens.
MacLean — in all his Jack Adams–winning, mustachioed wisdom — eschewed the charts and the graphs, the X’s and the O’s.
Nah, it was something an athlete can’t check or dangle or even see.
It was demons. Those ghosts of past playoff failures.
Not only were they lurking everywhere, but they were also powerful enough to make great players perform average or, worse, scared. They were fierce enough to spoil a 3-1 series stranglehold.
The question now, four springs later, with those same demons charged by four more disappointments, becomes: Will these more experienced and better-complemented Maple Leafs be strong enough to exorcise them once and for all?
“They gotta get to the second round. Win a second round. They gotta move on. The demons are still there right now,” MacLean said last week in an appearance on Sportsnet 590’s The Fan Morning Show.
At the time MacLean spoke, the Leafs had built a commanding 3-0 series lead over the wild-card Ottawa Senators. Their goaltending and special teams and defensive structure all looked superior. The stars had hung points on the board; they looked as good in real life as they do on paper.
Those pesky old demons? The Core Four had “kept them at bay,” said MacLean, also a former head coach of the Sens.
“If they do this in a sweep, that gets rid of a lot of them. The next one is gonna be harder. It’s gonna be one of those Florida teams,” he warned.
“If they finish this one quick,” he continued, “I think that’s going to give them a lot of confidence.”
A second-round victory over the mighty Panthers or Lightning would equal a trip to the conference final. The exorcism would then be complete.
Flash forward four days, and the demons are once again riding shotgun.
Shortly after Brady Tkachuk had pumped in a bonus empty-netter and helped skunk the Maple Leafs at Scotiabank Arena 4-0 Tuesday night, the Ottawa captain said he believed a seed of doubt had been planted.
Sens goalie Linus Ullmark, in the throes of a positive turnaround this series, has been part of a Bruins team that blew a 3-1 series lead, in 2023, to the 8-seed Panthers. He has lived two Game 7 defeats and one Game 7 victory, just last spring over these Leafs.
The pressure a favourite feels to finish the task?
“Some groups are better at handling it than others,” Ullmark says.
The stats and history are a mounting stack of evidence which group the Matthews-Marner-Nylander group falls under. “We’ll spare Leafs fans the unkind numbers; they’re readily available if you want to look and feel sad.)
“I get it. That’s all I hear around here is ‘Core, core, core. The Core Four.’ But it’s on everybody in the team,” head coach Craig Berube, playing the role of Father Lankester Merrin here, told reporters in Toronto Wednesday. “We’re a team, and it’s on the whole team. Not just four guys.
“It gets to the point where there’s a lot of past stuff I hear around here. That’s fine. That’s part of it all. But the only pressure they have is to their own teammates, in my opinion.”
Digging into the data or reconfiguring new fantasy lines or making some desperate goalie switch for Toronto heading into Thursday’s Game 6 at Canadian Tire Centre begins to feel like wasted energy.
“I don’t want to change too much. I think there’s been a lot of good,” Berube said of potential tactical or personnel adjustments.
Bottom line, it’s the demonized that need to give their head a spin and drive the stake into a very beatable, incredibly inexperienced but wholly committed opponent.
The special teams and goaltending edge have flipped, but they can reverse once more. We’ll still take the team that has two chances to advance over the one down to its last life.
“It only takes one thing to change the momentum,” MacLean reminded.
The ’25 Sens remind us of the ’17 Leafs. They’re playing with house money and giving the better, deeper team a good fright.
That April, then-Leafs coach Mike Babcock labelled it “the pucker factor,” the miliary term for what his worry-free youngsters were imposing on the contending Washington Capitals.
Babcock said this with great glee. Even so much as the dream of an all-time upset can make a competitive man giddy.
On the Sens side, the taste of a spoil is beginning to taste equally delicious. As their supposedly overmatched players and impressively vocal fan base are striking a similar tone.
“We got nothing to lose,” says defenceman Thomas Chabot, author of Game 5’s winning goal. “We know we have a lot of talent, and we know we can battle with these guys, and it’s shown the last few games.”
Yes, the quick-study Senators, so reckless in Game 1, have shown much resolve.
But the Maple Leafs have shown that — even with a composed, pedigreed bench boss and a legitimate six-man defence corps and the blessings of full health — the demons are still milling about.
Despite starting the Battle of Ontario two days earlier than the Battle of Florida, and despite earning a 3-0 series lead, they have left the possibility of a reverse sweep on the table.
Win in six or seven, and the horns won’t honk down Yonge as loud as they would have after four or five.
At best, the Maple Leafs have already blown some goodwill with their own fans and a bunch of days to rest up for what was supposed to be the real test and invoked the din of their own past.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t regain that, one win at a time.
“We have to stick together. We’ve been in this spot before. We have to understand we have the lead in this series. No reason to panic,” Morgan Rielly told reporters. “(The media) has a job to do, and it’s about us doing ours.”
Doing that job, MacLean believes, means finding that fine mental line between acknowledging the demons yet also remaining in the moment. To not let them steal the wheel.
“Somebody has to address it,” MacLean said.
“Demons can reappear all the time.”
