How much is at stake for the Toronto Maple Leafs’ core if they can’t pull off a miracle comeback?

Every minute the Toronto Maple Leafs play in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs doubles as a lesson. And thus far, most of them are extremely harsh.

Lesson 1: Just because you battled to overcome a physical team in the first round doesn’t mean life gets easier in Round 2. The Leafs left their series with the Tampa Bay Lightning wearing their bruises like badges of honor. Luke Schenn threw down with Tanner Jeannot? Mark Giordano fought Zach Bogosian? Morgan Rielly, black eye? The Florida Panthers cared not. Minutes into Game 1, they turned Toronto’s zone into a meat tenderizing exhibition, hammering them with heavy forecheck after heavy forecheck.

Lesson 2: The Stanley Cup playoffs are random, and that includes goaltending. Sergei Bobrovsky entered spring 2022-23 known as one of the worst postseason performers of his generation and didn’t even open the playoffs as Florida’s starting goaltender. So, naturally, after he took over the crease from Alex Lyon partway through Game 3, he helped Florida pull an all-time great upset over Boston and embark on what is now a six-game winning streak. Across those victories, ‘Bob’ has a .921 save percentage. He has two Vezina Trophies on his shelf and thus isn’t devoid of talent. Goalies can get hot. And you have to find a way to push through it by creating enough scoring chances for it not to matter.

Lesson 3: Playoff seeds are just numbers. The Los Angeles Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2011-12 as a No. 8 seed. These Panthers were a year removed from a Presidents’ Trophy and had some terrible injury and health luck early this season. Only the Edmonton Oilers scored more goals per game from Jan. 1 onward. If the Panthers were good enough to knock off Boston, they’re good enough to beat anyone. They deserved to be here just as much as the Leafs did.

Lesson 4: Whatever you accomplished in Round 1 goes ‘poof’ once you commence Round 2. It’s easy to forget that Mitch Marner, leading the brigade of disappearing Toronto Maple Leafs stars against the Panthers, had 11 points in six games against Tampa. None of it matters now. The Leafs’ star quintet of Marner, Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares and Morgan Rielly have yet to tally a single goal in this series.

Lesson 5: Mistakes are magnified. Carter Verhaeghe slipping behind T.J. Brodie for a breakaway decided Game 1. Toronto’s sleepy 47-second stretch to open the second period made the difference in Game 2. Repeated bouts of lackadaisical puck management and defensive zone coverage gave the Panthers the space to rally from multiple one-goal deficits and take Game 3 in overtime.

So far in this series, the Florida Panthers have educated the Leafs on what it means to swim into a deeper part of the pool for the first time in 19 years. You can’t rely on power plays and bounces and puck luck. It doesn’t always matter if you deserve to win on paper and have the major edge in 5-on-5 scoring chances. The playoffs aren’t always fair and linear that way. You have to take what you want rather than expect it to land at your feet.

A Leafs team that showed surprising mental toughness in persevering with three road overtime wins in Round 1 seems to be out of pushback in Round 2. So it stands to reason at this point: what happens if the Leafs get swept? Does it completely undo the goodwill established by advancing past the first round?

More specifically: trailing 3-0 in the series, how many games do the Leafs need to win to salvage any sense of accomplishment and avoid a “blow it up” scenario?

You take a match to the thing if Toronto gets swept. One win? Still a flaccid effort. Even two wins might feel like an artificial “made it close.”

The Leafs would probably have to force a Game 7 for team president Brendan Shanahan to be remotely justified in wanting to keep the core group together. Though it’s debatable if even that would be enough.

“A single series win in seven seasons since Toronto drafted Matthews first overall” goes on the ledger with anything less than the Leafs becoming the fifth NHL team in 105 years to rally from a 3-0 series deficit. With GM Kyle Dubas’ contract coming up this summer, and Matthews and Nylander entering the final seasons of their deals, it’s difficult to envision yet another “run it back” scenario if the Leafs get eliminated from the playoffs between now and next Tuesday.

No matter what happens, the franchise will enter the offseason facing a litany of potential changes. On the superficial level: will the team try to keep UFAs Ryan O’Reilly and Noel Acciari, acknowledging their useful contributions but paying them for what will amount to their decline years? Will defenseman Mark Giordano retire or head to LTIR Land rather than play out the final season of his deal, given he has looked close to cooked at age 39 in these playoffs? Will the Leafs re-sign pending UFA Luke Schenn on a team-friendly deal? Will Ilya Samsonov’s strong regular season trump his shaky playoffs when the Leafs are deciding whether to re-sign him?

All those questions concern cosmetic roster surgery and only make sense in the context of a team still trying to maintain some semblance of a core and keep pushing for a championship in 2023-24. Going out against Florida with a whimper, particularly in a sweep, will invite questions about much more sweeping changes. If the Leafs go the reload route: William Nylander, whose $6.96 million cap hit makes it highly appealing to trade suitors, could be sacrificed in a trade if he can net the Leafs a true top-pair defenseman capable of shutting down the opposition’s best forwards.

But Nylander talk doesn’t really move the needle. Even he said last summer that it’s pretty much an annual tradition. What’s different about this spring is that the result in the next few days will bring about the true big-picture questions. John Tavares and his $11 million AAV are pretty much welded to the Toronto payroll, but what happens to Marner and Matthews? They have two and one year remaining on their contracts, respectively. Marner is the locally bred energy guy who sets the tone in the Leafs’ dressing room but tends to recede when the play gets particularly physical in the playoffs, and he has struggled at times with accountability following major defeats. Matthews is the easy-going star who seems to handle the pressure better but, like Marner, hasn’t consistently maintained his lofty standard in the postseason and seems more likely to be tempted by markets closer to his home state of Arizona. If not the Coyotes, the rising Los Angeles Kings or shiny-toy-chasing Vegas Golden Knights could come beckoning by summer 2024.

The Leafs have no official compulsion to blow up the core and consider moving out their stars, but they have to look at their own opponent this spring and consider the possibilities if they behave boldly. The Panthers won the Presidents’ Trophy last year, ground out a first-round win and got embarrassingly swept in the second round, managing three goals in four games against the Tampa Bay Lightning. So they traded their top scorer in Jonathan Huberdeau and No. 2 defenseman in MacKenzie Weegar to the Calgary Flames in the century’s biggest blockbuster to go get a true dawg in Matthew Tkachuk. They also punted Jack Adams Award finalist coach Andrew Brunette and replaced him with Paul Maurice. A year later, they’re a win away from the Eastern Conference Final and the current Stanley Cup betting favorites to boot.

So maybe the humiliation of a sweep or five-game loss will shock the Leafs into doing something drastic this summer. As for who engineers those changes? It’s a question without an answer yet with Dubas’ job quite possibly on the line along with that of coach Sheldon Keefe, who has looked overmatched more often than not when trying to make adjustments this postseason.

Once the Leafs are out, we’ll surely dive into all these questions in greater detail. First, they get a chance to prove the detractors wrong and pen an improbable comeback story. Tonight, rookie goaltender Joseph Woll takes over the net with the kind of twinkle in his eye that makes you stop – just for a second – and wonder if there’s a chance.

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