It wasn’t just the win – it was how the Leafs won Game 1 that matters

Whether you were the most blindly faithful Toronto Maple Leafs fan or the franchise’s most gleeful hater, most of us would’ve agreed this Leafs team at least looked different going into the playoffs. For better or worse, they weren’t built exactly the same as the clubs that had delivered so many crushing playoff disappointments in the first eight years of the Auston Matthews / Mitch Marner era.

The 2024-25 club skewed toward brawn over finesse, tipping the scales as the NHL’s largest. It received its best regular-season goaltending of the entire salary cap era, sitting top-three in team save percentage. Its under-the-hood analytics looked worse, not better, than the best Kyle Dubas-built teams. But the bet being made by GM Brad Treliving was that this group was built to succeed in the spring, not the winter.

And what did we see in Game 1 of Toronto’s first round series versus the Ottawa Senators Sunday night? A trip through the Bizarro World, wherein the Leafs seemed to showcase all the things they’d been missing in recent playoff runs en route to a 6-2 shellacking.

They started the game not as the shrinking road team on its heels in a raucous building, as they were when the Boston Bruins blew them out in Game 1 at TD Garden a year ago. This time, the Leafs were the aggressor from puck drop at home, with Max Domi and Scott Laughton in particular setting the tone, inviting the Scotiabank Arena crowd into the Battle of Ontario with bludgeoning blows on the forecheck. The Leafs drew first blood on the scoreboard, when 2024 Stanley Cup winner Oliver Ekman-Larsson walked into the slot untouched and buried a wrist shot past goaltender Linus Ullmark after taking a feed from Laughton.

The Leafs got big-time scoring from, gasp, the Core Four, the maligned superstar brigade who is supposed to disappear during big games. Mitch Marner, the contract-year man under more pressure than any other player present Sunday, finished off a picture-perfect breakaway deke after taking a stretch pass from Matthews partway through the first period. William Nylander widened a lead to 3-1 with a deceptive long-range wrist shot early in the second, and John Tavares collected his own rebound after a redirection to break open the game at 4-1.

Oh, and those latter two goals: they came on the power play, where the Leafs have absolutely ghosted in recent postseasons. They went a woeful 1 for 21 across seven games against the Bruins last year, yet they converted three times with the man advantage in Game 1 Sunday, the third power-play marker coming when Matthew Knies corralled a loose puck in the blue ice.

“Power play’s been rolling for a while,” said Leafs head coach Craig Berube. “They’re doing a good job of, for me, it’s about getting pucks on the net with numbers [in front of] it. And I can’t say enough about Matthew Knies and ‘JT’ in those areas. They’ve done an extremely good job at all their work in the interior of the ice.”

Toronto had gotten major letdowns in net at inopportune moments over the past several postseasons, seemingly always facing a rival puck-stopper on an absolute heater. But Sunday? Anthony Stolarz stood tall exactly when it mattered most. He wasn’t perfect, fighting the puck for much of the evening, and he coughed up an ugly rebound leading to a Drake Batherson goal late in the first period. But Stolarz stoned Senators captain Brady Tkachuk on what could’ve been the tying goal when the score was 2-1 in the second period after Tkachuk blew past Leafs blueliner Morgan Rielly, who had a rough night. Stolarz robbed an all-alone Shane Pinto from point blank in the slot, again when the score was 2-1. Those two stops, the exact kind Ilya Samsonov could not be counted on to make in Game 7 last year, bought Toronto time to pull away.

“He made some key saves at some real key times today,” Tavares said. “And this speaks to the competitor he is, the type of goalie really starting to prove himself as an elite netminder. Just love his demeanor, his lightheartedness, and then once those pads and mask go on, he’s a hell of a competitor and he’s barking and he’s competing extremely hard.”

The Leafs also repeatedly remedied what typically would be take-the-air-out-of-the-building moments. The most important came in the third period, when Ridly Greig narrowed the gap to 4-2, cleaning up another rebound from Stolarz. The deficit stayed at two goals for just 45 seconds before a seeing-eye shot from Rielly deflected off Matthew Highmore’s stick for an own goal, putting Toronto up 5-2.

Even after the game, there was no complaining from the Leafs about the controversial play of Greig in Game 1, which included a crosscheck to Tavares’ face, which resulted in a major penalty reduced to a minor on a review, and a collision with Stolarz late in the third period when the game was out of reach. With a Stanley Cup winning coach steering them in Berube, the players didn’t take any bait, and neither did he.

“It’s not my call,” Berube said. “The referees and the league will look at things and make the calls they make. We’re not going to focus on that. We’ve got to focus on what we need to do win the next game, okay? It’s the same as, I thought they made some attempts at our goalie to slide into him and things like that. But that’s not for us to worry about. We’ve got to focus on playing. We’ve got to focus on ourselves and what we need to do.”

It was a single game. It would be silly to declare every Leaf problem repaired. Senators coach Travis Green said he liked his team’s 5-on-5 play, and he was bang on: Ottawa generated 64.71 percent of the scoring chances and 64.79 percent of the expected goals at 5-on-5. The trajectory of Game 1 could’ve been very different with a few saves from Ullmark at the right time, too. Tkachuk was exactly the dominating forecheck force we knew he’d be, and Greig really got under Toronto’s skin with his agitation game. They and the Sens will push hard in Game 2. But there’s no denying Toronto showed exactly what it needed to show in Game 1. The jitters weren’t there. The big stars delivered. The Leafs looked like a superior team confident in its ability to handle an opponent that finished 11 points behind them in the standings. And they aren’t letting their heads get too big over it.

“Well, it’s one game,” Nylander said. “It’s nice to get six goals to start off a series, but it’s on to the next game. They’re gonna come out hotter.”

One game, yes. But the Blue and White blueprint for what to do going forward is established.