MAYBE NEXT YEAR

Leaf blueprint has to change

You can try to explain the unending cycle of failure from a thousand angles. But let’s start with this.

The Auston Matthews-era Toronto Maple Leafs have now lost in nine straight attempts to clinch a first playoff series since 2004 — the longest streak of post-season futility in the NHL. And in the heat of those nine losses, including Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to the Tampa Bay Lightning at Scotiabank Arena, the Leafs’ power play heads into another early vacation in the midst of an 0-for-18 cold streak. Oh-for-18. Woe be this team. Think about that for a second. In these repeating moments of franchise-defining frustration, again and again the Leafs have found themselves desperate for a gamechanging goal. And again and again, their power play has failed to provide it. This year the power play that led the league with 27 per cent regular-season efficiency, the top mark in the history of the franchise, was rendered moot when it mattered.

That’s beyond significant. Because in Toronto, the power play isn’t just another special team. It’s the essence of the team.

More often than not, it includes the franchise’s core five players — forwards Matthews, Mitch Marner, John Tavares and William Nylander, along with defenceman Morgan Rielly. In the current brain trust’s all-in commitment to stacking skill upon skill upon skill, that quintet accounts for more than half of the team’s salary cap.

But as much as those five have been a big reason for Toronto’s many regular-season successes, they’re also the through-line in the recurring nightmare of post-season stumbles. Maybe it tells you something about the wisdom of devoting so much of a team’s resources to a core so easily neutered under the playoff microscope.

Forget the power play. In five tries at winner-take-all playoff games, Matthews and Marner have combined for a grand total of zero goals at all strengths. In nine potential series clinchers, all losses, the core four forwards have a combined six goals.

If that’s the Leafs putting their balls on the line, somebody’s rear end ought to be in a sling.

Of course, there are those who won’t hear such blasphemy of Toronto’s prodigies. Fair enough. Maybe you’d rather blame the referees. Toronto’s attempts at closing out their latest series came with controversial calls in Games 6 and 7. Most egregious was a would-be Game 7 goal by Tavares called back because Toronto defenceman Justin Holl helped free Tavares with an illegal screen worthy of a detailshirking basketball big man. Who knew NHL refs are now enforcing the NBA rule book?

And maybe this loss was different

than the others in another way. The Leafs tried hard and played well, after all — a bare-bones job description cast as a silver lining of newfound virtue by some. And let’s not underestimate the greatness of the superior opponent.

“The fact that you come that close against that team …” said Sheldon Keefe, the Maple Leafs coach. “You can debate the merits of any sort of credit you might want to give our team, but I don’t know if you can debate anything that you give the Tampa Bay Lightning, and who they are.”

To be fair, that team wasn’t the Lightning so much as Lightning Lite. It was the two-time defending champions largely without Brayden Point, who played one shift in the second period and had to pack it in after suffering an undisclosed injury. It was the two-time defending champions with a clearly diminished Nikita Kucherov who, according to a tweet from TSN hockey insider Darren Dreger, hadn’t been feeling well around Game 6 and 7. It was the two-time defending champions with an overworked goaltender, Andrei Vasilevskiy, who put up an underwhelming .897 save percentage in the series. It was the two-time defending champions running on fumes and there for the taking.

And in the grand scheme of Toronto’s litany of failure, are the opponents really the problem? A season ago they lost to the worst team in the NHL playoffs as measured by regular-season points. The year before they lost to the Columbus Blue Jackets. In the years before that, the unbeatable boogeymen were Boston and Washington.

This is a league where underdogs often win, where upsets happen, where chaos reigns. Except in Toronto, where the pathos is as predictable as it is perennial.

It wouldn’t be a moment of Leafs infamy without a twist of the knife. On the same weekend, the Florida Panthers ended what was previously the NHL’s longest first-round playoff drought by dispatching Washington, and they did it with former Leafs prospect Carter Ver- haeghe scoring three straight game-winning goals over a former Cup champion. Sadly for Toronto fans, hockey’s clutch goal scorer of the moment was traded away in 2015 as part of the package of prospects that fetched Michael Grabner, who lasted one season as a Leaf.

Even the Oilers, who’ve done their best to squander the prime years of high-end talents Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, won a series on the weekend. McDavid’s now been in the second round twice — which, to a Toronto ear, sounds dynastic.

That’s the reality. The bar, for Toronto, couldn’t be lower. Nobody was reasonably expecting this team to end the longest Stanley Cup drought in NHL history, 55 years and counting. Cup-winning teams are stocked with players who grab games by the throat; on Saturday, the Leafs’ passive strategy seemed built on hoping for a lucky bounce.

Still, it seems a small ask to occasionally luck into first-round success. It feels like no team loses like this Leafs team does.

Consider this: According to Stats Inc., the Leafs became the first team in the history of the NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball to lose a winner-take-all game in the opening round of the post-season in five straight seasons.

Maybe that tells the optimists they’re on the brink of a breakthrough. Maybe it’s an argument for running it back, for heralding the Lightning, for blaming the refs, for keeping the faith. You’d do that only by seeing this most recent season in isolation, and ignoring the glaring, undeniable patterns: an 0-9 record in would-be playoff clinchers, an 0-for-18 cold streak with a man advantage on the cusp of playoff advancement.

It’s like former Leafs coach Mike Babcock once had it: “Our power play is our toughness.” That was roster-mocking code for what Babcock really wanted to say, which was: You can’t build a playoff contender on a foundation of five guys who define themselves, first and foremost, by skill sets that shine brightest in the regular season.

Babcock was convinced of it years ago. And given how the results haven’t changed since, the question for team president Brendan Shanahan is this: How many times do you shudder at the same sour taste before you acknowledge the mix just isn’t right?