somethin kinda neat i found out…if you ignore a problem for long enough, it either goes away or ruins your life. so 50/50. pretty good odds.
@bobby
i started writing this after the game 5 loss. i waited until the morning after game 6 to finish it up and post it. at the time, i was thinking that there was a good chance the leafs could lose their first round series again, but that they were probably going to pull out a win somewhere. so i felt comfortable enough to start writing with that premise in mind. as you can see, i even wrote all of it in past-tense, as if i were speaking in retrospect, safe in the knowledge that i could just delete all this shit if things went south again. that you are reading this now is a testament to the fact that things have not gone fully south. and that, in leafland, is cause for celebration.
during the first intermission of the game 5 broadcast, ron mclean made the old joke about leafs fans “planning the parade” after morgan rielly’s opening goal. but that joke has always rung a little hollow to me. most of the leafs fans i come across on social media have never once asserted that the leafs were definitely about to win a stanley cup in any of the seasons that i have followed them. at most, some of us get excited at the mere prospect of winning a cup. and what’s wrong with that? isn’t the ability to hope the entire point of following sports?
the toronto maple leafs lost seven consecutive first-round post-season series, six if you only count series that featured any of their current players. the odds of losing a coin flip six times in a row is 1.56%. with the current core of auston matthews, mitch marner, william nylander, and rielly, the leafs also lost 10 games in a row where they had the opportunity to eliminate their opponents with a win. the odds of losing a coin flip 10 times is less than 0.1%. in other words — extremely unlikely, but still hypothetically possible. hockey is obviously more complex than a coin flip & its participants have greater agency to affect the outcome of games than someone trying to predict how a coin will land, but i do think this is an instructive example. in a life where billions upon billions of discrete “things” occur, unlikely things will happen fairly often. plenty of things are possible, so we must be careful not to assume that just because events unfolded in a certain way (or have unfolded in the same way in the past) that they were always “destined” to occur that way. i make this mistake all the time, and so do many other sports commentators and fans.
take, for instance, james mirtle, the athletic‘s head leafs writer. he wrote an article after their game 1 blowout loss lamenting the potentially ignominious end of michael bunting’s tenure with the leafs. after delivering a dangerous open-ice body check to tampa’s erik cernak, he rightfully received a game misconduct and three-game suspension. mirtle wrote that, after three games, “the best-case scenario is he steps back into the lineup with the series tied 2-2, and [head coach sheldon] keefe gives him a chance back in his old spot with the leafs’ top players.” athletic subscriber “tim g.” noticed an error in that framing, writing “isn’t the best case scenario 3-1?,” to which mirtle replied “the realistic best case scenario…” [emphasis mine]. in saying this, mirtle demonstrated a seeming lack of understanding as to the definition of “best-case scenario.” tim g. was dead right. the leafs could, and indeed did, go up 3-1 in the series with three consecutive wins in games 2 through 4 coinciding with bunting’s suspension. mirtle’s belief in the inevitability of what he defined as a “realistic” outcome led him to dismiss the mere possibility that something unexpected could occur.
likewise, when i wrote last year that the leafs were a “team of and for losers,” for whom “nothing good [was] ever allowed to happen in the post-season,” i fell victim to the same lack of imagination. i was reflecting on their recent string of series where they appeared to play well enough to win but couldn’t catch a break. logically, i understood that the leafs weren’t “cursed,” but i had no other explanation at hand for why this core had lost six straight playoff series. as it turned out, i was thinking about it all wrong. i shouldn’t have needed a logical explanation. sometimes, there just isn’t one. and that’s ok. it’s on me for expecting the outcomes of a chaotic universe to fall neatly into an observable and predictable pattern.
sean “down goes brown” mcindoe1, arguably the most prominent leafs fan in sportswriting today, fretted that their 7-3 loss in game 1 was yet another sign of impending doom: “tuesday night [might have been] the turning point, when this young team that isn’t all that young anymore finally found their pride and learned that final lesson about what it takes to be a real contender. or it wasn’t, and instead, it was just this version of the leafs being themselves, same as it ever was, same as it always will be,” concluding that “even the most passionate fan can’t buy [the] story” that the core is good enough to compete in the playoffs and should be brought back for next year even in the event of another playoff defeat. now, listen. i don’t consider myself the most passionate fan. i don’t paint my face blue and white, or promise to eat cat shit when the leafs win. but i still like the players and wanted many of them to be brought back, even if they lost to tampa again. i know most fans wouldn’t agree with me, but there is value in regular season success. for most of the year, i basically do not have to worry about a single game. if i get to watch a win, that’s delightful! but if i watch a loss, i can shrug it off right away because “they’ll probably win the next one.” and that’s so comfortable a position to be in as a hockey fan! the wins are fun and the losses don’t matter. right up until the last few weeks of the season, when they apparently become a matter of life-and-death significance. in the leafs’ recent history, the playoffs have been a two-week letdown at the tail end of a months-long campaign of frequent victories that are enjoyable in and of themselves. i don’t need to hear people tell me that playoff success is the only thing that matters in hockey. players might feel that way, front offices might feel that way, most other fans might feel that way, but i don’t. if you can’t try to enjoy yourself in defeat, what the hell have any of us been doing for the past 56 years?
maybe this season is different. maybe the leafs did “flip a switch” and recognized the importance of winning in the playoffs. but i know that people are only saying so now because they happened to win a fourth playoff game, just one more than in any season since 2004. something that an indeterminate combination of eight teams, due to the playoff format, must do every year. so it could’ve been by accident! and if that’s the case, maybe their losses were by accident too.
i don’t know why they weren’t able to get it done in previous seasons. i don’t know why they did this year! podcaster and former pension plan puppets writer arvind observed that “the matthews era leafs’ first playoff series win coming in their worst-played series from a skater perspective in the last 5 years is deeply ironic.” i absolutely see what he’s saying and agree to an extent. in the first round (not counting the three games-7 yet to be played), the leafs were last among all 16 playoff teams with a 44.6% 5v5 corsi-for percentage (a team’s shots on net + missed shots + blocked shots, expressed as a percentage of total shot attempts at even-strength). if you talked to someone in 2015, they would’ve said: that’s awful! but when you adjust for shot quality, the leafs turn out more favourably. according to evolving-hockey’s model, the leafs had 49.0% of the expected goals. still “underwater,” but a lot closer to coinflip territory. still, though, it’s a far cry from 2021’s 56.2% xGF, 2020’s 52.8%, and it’s fractionally worse than last year’s 49.8%.
i love these bullshit hypothetical stats, i really do. i know i just called them “bullshit,” but it’s with affection in my heart. they can be useful as a heuristic to predict if a team’s regular season play is conducive to sustained winning in the future. the best teams in the league, after all, are typically the ones that consistently outshoot and “outchance” their opponents. but what have we been saying this whole time? there’s so much random luck that goes into winning individual hockey games, and playoff sample sizes are too small from which to draw meaningful conclusions. any team that makes the playoffs could conceivably win a series or get to the final. hell, we saw that with montreal in 2021! that was a fuckin awful team. they had more losses than wins and a negative goal differential in the regular season. even after their miracle run to the final, which included a second-round sweep over the winnipeg jets, they still finished with four more losses than wins on the year as a whole. they proved how bad they were by coming out the following season, shitting the bed immediately, and becoming the first team in league history to finish in 32nd-place in the standings. and we lost to them in the first round after holding a 3-1 lead! i seem to recall people calling that “embarrasing” and a “choke.” anybody who tried to excuse the loss by pointing out that actually, the leafs scored more goals than the habs did!, or that they had a 56% xG!, was laughed at. in the playoffs, you’re told that teams just need to “find a way to win,” “have a killer instinct,” and so forth. in other words, process doesn’t matter; only results do. but why does that only apply when the leafs lose, and not when they win?
did the leafs deserve to win this series? well, they needed three overtime wins to get it done, and you could easily imagine a universe in which one bounce goes the other way and the series is tied at three or maybe even tampa wins in six. if you define “deserve” as “generate the most ‘expected goals’ according to publicly available statistical models across a six-game sample,” then no. but more importantly, who gives a shit. they won anyway. we’ve been waiting for this for 19 years. you could argue they “deserved” to win against columbus and montreal if that’s your criterion. they didn’t win those series. the knowledge that they played mostly well but couldn’t score in the exact right sequence needed to advance didn’t make any of us feel better. now that they’ve finally done that, do we really need to squander the moment by asking ourselves if, on some grand philosophical level, they “deserved it”? just enjoy yourself, man.
we’ve been asking ourselves for years why the leafs can’t seem to win when the games count. there’s been no shortage of proposed explanations. porous defence, bad goaltending, mitch marner’s production drying up in the second half of a series. each of these have some merit. this year, for instance, marner led the team with 11 points, but only one of those came in games 5 or 6 when the leafs could’ve clinched the series. why is that? does he get too nervous? does he pat himself on the back too early & take his foot off the proverbial gas pedal? does he hate leafs fans and want us to suffer? i think the only honest answer is i don’t know. you’d expect a frequent point-per-game player, one of the game’s highest-paid wingers, to continue his regular season success into the playoffs. i have no clue why he typically hasn’t. i don’t have access to his inner mind! we can all construct our own little post-hoc narratives and act as though we had predictive ability all along, but few of us actually do. any psychological explanation i might offer would be pure guesswork and projection. so let me do that right now! for fun.
it’s so fuckin hard just to be alive sometimes. i couldn’t possibly blame someone for wilting under the pressure associated with being a star player for the toronto maple leafs, the league’s richest, most-hated, most-snake-bitten franchise. i get that matthews, marner, nylander, tavares, et al. are highly, highly compensated for their skills and are by no means comparable to the “average joe” in their level of fame, access to capital, and the social power that those afford. but! try as i might, i can’t blame any of these guys for their past failures. they’ve given me little reason to doubt their effort, and they don’t owe me playoff success, no matter how much i have longed for it.
as a depressed trans woman™, i’m sympathetic to how difficult “self-fulfilling prophecies” can be to break. if you, for instance, spent each of the last six years listening to the collected sports media and fandom call you “losers” and “chokers” who “fold under pressure,” and so forth, would it be any surprise if that eventually got through to you? it can damage your confidence. you start thinking, “well, maybe everyone is right about us.” maybe we are losers. maybe i am just a confused, sad, lonely “man” who wishes “he” were somebody else. you start to internalize that there’s something inherently wrong with you.
so if there’s something i can take away from this ultimately meaningless trifle of entertainment, it’s that there’s no such thing as “destiny.” there’s no such thing as a “curse.” the leafs have the longest stanley cup drought in league history not because they’ve been a uniquely incompetent franchise for that entire run, but because events beyond any one individual’s control just never unfolded in precisely the correct way. the “stars never aligned,” if you prefer. maybe they will this year! and if not, there’s always next time. a better life is always possible.
footnote
1. i would like to pause to take a victory lap, if i may. i will note that mcindoe predicted tampa would win the series in 5. five! a truly insane take. how do you not at least give the leafs enough benefit of the doubt to lose in 7 like they always did? what a moron. (just kidding. i do like his writing most of the time. i just thought he was overly pessimistic about the leafs all season long, and my opinion has finally been borne out by this playoff result! but man, in the puck soup podcast episode that he and ryan lambert recorded after the leafs traded for matt murray and signed ilya samsonov, he sounded so fuckin defeated. like his dog had been shot by the cops or something. it’s like, chill out, dude. we’re trying to have fun here!)
ruminations of a sad oaf. 