Are Leafs too messy – on the ice and behind the bench – to make playoffs?
It was a night Kirill Marchenko says he’ll never forget. Who wouldn’t cherish scoring a hat trick in their eighth game playing for an Original Six franchise? But he couldn’t even muster a smile after the game Thursday night. Not when his Toronto Maple Leafs squandered a 4-2 divisional lead to their Atlantic Division rival Buffalo Sabres and fell 5-4 in overtime.
In many ways, Thursday’s game was a microcosm of Toronto’s young season. The Leafs brought the Scotiabank Arena faithful to their feet early and often. Captain Auston Matthews, looking back to his superstar self, converted a deftly threaded Jack Roslovic pass to put Toronto ahead just 2:24 in. And Marchenko was spectacular, particularly on his first of three goals, a scintillating between-the-legs snipe on the power play.
But every time the Leafs looked dangerous, they made their opponent look equally dangerous. Their first lead lasted just 1:11 after Jack Quinn’s wrister trickled through goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. Quinn erased Toronto’s 2-1 lead early in the second period with another goal. And the Leafs really collapsed in the third after veteran leader John Tavares left the game following a scary collision with Sabres center Josh Norris. Tavares lay facedown and motionless for what felt like a long while before gingerly leaving the ice with an undisclosed injury for which coach Jim Hiller had no update.
The Leafs, frankly, lost their composure from the moment Tavares left the ice. They were caved in 18-7 on shot attempts in the third period, holding on for dear life, with Hiller curiously keeping left winger Gavin McKenna nailed to the bench even after losing Tavares, shoehorning checker Teddy Blueger onto the second line instead. The Leafs cowered as Dennis Gilbert, then Mattias Samuelsson solved Bobrovsky two minutes apart to tie the game 4-4. And Owen Power slipped past Marchenko to earn a clean look in the slot and rip the winner home for Buffalo in overtime.
The Leafs got beaten by three defensemen in succession to sloppily cough up a game that seemed in hand.
They were sloppy in their defensive play minus top shutdown blueliner Chris Tanev. The Leafs had an expected goal share of 21.66 percent in the third and 15.91 percent in overtime. Troy Stecher was on the ice for three Buffalo goals at 5-on-5. Jake McCabe was on for two as he continues a curiously rough start to his season. And the Leafs are struggling to defend as a group. So far this season, they sit 28th in expected goal differential. They’ve allowed at least three goals in seven of eight games, and they’ve scored at least five goals in two of their three wins. They can only succeed in track-meet environments.
“It’s all five guys, I think,” Matthews said. “The forwards, we need to do a better job of supporting our team in all areas of the defensive zone and making sure that we’re on the same page down there. Not four guys or three guys, five guys, especially against good teams with skill who’ve got ‘D’ that are extremely mobile and like to move around in our defensive zone. We’ve just got to be able to communicate.”
The Leafs were disquietingly sloppy in their late-game shepherding from Hiller, too. His reasoning for the McKenna benching was befuddling to say the least. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when your head coach struggles to articulate his own decision minutes after a game.
“You know what? That was my decision,” Hiller said. “We went for a stretch, we had those penalties. I wanted to get him out there. He sat through the penalties, and then I didn’t get him out there. Through that stretch, and then in the last few minutes of the period, we’re just trying to get out of the period, I guess you would say. And then now, as I’ve sat him for so long, and he sits in the intermission, so I probably should have got him out there early in the third. I didn’t. So I’ll talk to him about that.”
The goaltending Toronto got from Bobrovsky wasn’t exactly sloppy but wasn’t clutch, either. He wasn’t the problem Thursday, as most of Buffalo’s goals came on frighteningly uncontested looks. But the future Hall of Famer also couldn’t come up with that save when Toronto needed it most, be it on Samuelsson’s equalizer or Power’s winner.
The Leafs are entertaining as hell. They rank in the upper crust of the NHL in most offensive metrics and are ninth in goals per game, while they’re in the bottom third of the league in most defensive metrics and sit 23rd in goals against per game. No lead is safe whether they have it or their opponent does. Per Sportsnet’s Luke Fox, the Leafs are 3-3-2 yet have led in all five of their losses this season.
That makes the Leafs quite a bit of fun from a watchability standpoint. But can a messy Toronto team actually make the playoffs in 2026-27? It’s highly debatable. It appears GM John Chayka has successfully exorcised the dump-and-chase demons of previous coach Craig Berube and made this team dynamic again, but the Leafs are also wildly disorganized in their own zone, staying afloat via their league-best penalty kill, which has an unsustainable 96.2-percent success rate. They’re short a crucial defenseman in Tanev, but, if we’re honest, they may be two or even three high-end NHL rearguards away from looking like a contender again.
If they don’t get the type of elite goaltending that masked their flaws two seasons ago, and if Tavares’ injury proves serious enough to deplete their offensive upside, there won’t be enough duct tape to cover Toronto’s ugly defensive tendencies. Chayka has solved many a problem with this team but not nearly enough of them yet.
That said: it’s early, and any team with turnover this unprecedented will need time to figure out its structure. The Leafs aren’t panicking by any means.
“You either win or you have a lesson to learn and get better,” Bobrovsky said. “I think it was a good lesson for us. We gave up lots of chances 5-on-5, and I think it can be cleaned up. So as we go, as we learn, those mistakes can be fixed, and we move on. We have a really good team here. Really skilled, really competitive guys. And yeah, we still gave up a little too much in the third. But it is what it is. It’s hockey. They have a good team too. They had a good push. We will reset, refocus on our mistakes tomorrow and get better.”
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