Maple Leafs hoping to replicate effort from playoff clincher against Panthers

TORONTO -- How do the Toronto Maple Leafs replicate this?

How do their well-known and well-paid stars, Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews and William Nylander and John Tavares, take the gritty, grinding yet effective blueprint -- the "not pretty stuff", as forward Matthew Knies called it -- of their 3-2 victory against the Florida Panthers Wednesday, and successfully implement it in just more than two weeks when the Stanley Cup Playoffs start?

Those questions won't be answered until the postseason officially kicks off later this month. And it won't be until then that the Maple Leafs season will be judged as either a success or a failure.

The win clinched a postseason berth for Toronto for a ninth consecutive time, meaning Marner, Matthews and Nylander have been in the playoffs every season since they started playing together in 2016.

Yet, in that time, the group has won only one series. In fact, the Maple Leafs elimination of the Tampa Bay Lightning in six games in the 2023 Eastern Conference First Round was the only time they've done it since 2004, a span of 21 years.

Enter Craig Berube, who was hired as coach last summer with the intention of changing the team's fortunes by changing its style. Fancy hockey, complete with highlight reel goals, were great for artistic merit but not so much for postseason success.

As such, he preached the type of north-south, straight-ahead style the St. Louis Blues used as their recipe to win the Stanley Cup in 2019 when he was their coach. All that remained was to gauge if Toronto's so-called big boys would buy into what he was selling.

From what the coach saw against the Panthers, they have.

"It's hard to make the playoffs," Berube said. "It's a tough league. It's tight. But our team, I think, has played very consistent this year, did a really good job of changing their style of play and playing a certain way and adapting to it over time.

"It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a while. But they've learned to figure it out with the different areas of the game and scoring and things like that.

"It's been a pleasure."

Especially when the big guns answer the call at both ends of the ice like they did against the Panthers.

Make no mistake. This was a Florida team that was missing some of its top players in forwards Matthew Tkachuk (lower body), Aleksander Barkov (upper body), and defensemen Aaron Ekblad (suspension) and Dmitry Kulikov (upper body). That's a talented chunk of the Panthers roster that didn't lace up.

At the same time, Berube was quick to point out that Toronto has been forced to play without some of its own key cogs earlier this season, most notably Matthews who missed 15 games with an upper body injury. In this league, the coach said, you play the hand you're dealt.

And now, with the Maple Leafs battling with the Panthers and Lightning for the top spot in the Atlantic, it was Matthews, Marner, Nylander and Tavares who stepped up.

It was Nylander who set up Tavares for Toronto's first goal in the second period to tie the game 1-1. Matthews then fed Marner for the goal ahead goal in the third. Marner followed with a great pass that sprung Knies for a breakaway goal that gave Toronto a 3-1 lead, one they would never relinquish.

But with all that said about Marner's offensive heroics, it was his defensive prowess in the final minutes while the Maple Leafs were holding a 3-2 lead that pleased his coach the most. At one point, the Toronto forward leapt in the air to bat down a puck, then dove to swat it out of the Toronto zone and relieve the pressure.

Whatever it takes.

"Our big guys, they're not just there to score," Berube said. "They're there to play 200-foot hockey, whether it's penalty killing, protecting the lead, just playing good defense.

"You need that from everybody. Doesn't matter who it is. You need guys who bought in to sacrificing and to play the other side of the puck."

Which is exactly what Knies saw from Toronto's elite players, especially with the clock ticking down and the game on the line.

"You saw in the last minute and a half," he said. "They stay out there and kill it and put it along the wall at the very end of the game. So, it's important for those guys to do that kind of thing and step up for us.

"It's fun to watch, to be honest. It's really cool for them to do stuff like that. You know, the not-pretty stuff."

The victory kept Toronto in first place entering Thursday with 96 points, three ahead of Tampa Bay and four in front of Florida. Tampa Bay has a game in hand on each team. It kicked off an eight-day span from April 2-9 in which the Maple Leafs play the Panthers twice (also April 8) and Lightning once (April 9). Tampa Bay and Florida will meet on April 15, the final regular-season game for the Panthers.

Winning these head-to-head matchups will go a long way for one of these three teams to finish in first in the division. Do that, and the odds favor a potential first-round series against the Ottawa Senators. The second and third-place teams, meanwhile, will have the unenviable task of playing each other.

Toronto won the first leg Wednesday. In the process, they know they now have better odds of controlling their own fate and not relying on other teams to help.

"To win games, you have to do everything it takes," said goalie Anthony Stolarz, who was on the Panthers last season. "We're going to need that kind of sacrifice (in the playoffs). I'm liking what I'm seeing out of the boys right now."

So does Marner.

"We stuck with it," he said.

It's a game plan for success they followed in what proved to be a key win in early April.

Whether they can stay disciplined enough to follow it up later this month once the Stanley Cup Playoffs starts, well, that remains to be seen.