After years of doing game-by-game analysis of the Toronto Maple Leafs certain trends have become regular themes on Real Kyper and Bourne. If you’ve listened with any consistency you’ve likely heard us refer to what had very clearly been an internal Team A, and a Team B.
Team A was Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Morgan Rielly.
Team B was everyone else, and they were assumed by many to be faceless and interchangeable. They were treated as such when it came to usage in big moments too.
For the first time in the Core Four era, you can reasonably say the gap between the internal “teams” on the Leafs was bridged, and that’s what dragged them across the finish line here. What was formerly Team B and is now just “some of the players on the team” were the difference-makers in pulling the Leafs through their first round series versus the wild card Ottawa Senators, much to the credit of head coach Craig Berube.
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I don’t mean this as a slight to the Leafs’ core guys, who were all above a point-per-game in the series save for Tavares (who for my money was the best of the elite group). I mean it specifically about the guys outside that group who elevated their games and made themselves important.
Consider:
• The Leafs’ blue line went from “we need to find a partner for Rielly” and some stragglers behind him, to a six-man group, any of whom you’d be comfortable putting on the ice when trying to close out a game.
Chris Tanev was the Leafs’ defensive rock, anchoring an elite shut-down pair with Jake McCabe. Brandon Carlo helped steady Rielly, while Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Simon Benoit played with a confidence that at times made them the team’s best pair.
• Scott Laughton’s addition and early position in the lineup could’ve led to a new player sulking about his lack of opportunity, which he’d have been justified in doing. But Laughton stuck with it and has become one of the team’s most integral forwards, killing penalties and ragging pucks in the offensive zone while providing the backbone as the centre of a reliable playoff-style line. In Round 1 he averaged the sixth-most ice time of their 12 forwards (14:10), behind the usual five (which includes Knies).
• They got big moments from unlikely sources. An OT rip of a shot from Max Domi, who almost never shoots. And OT rip from Benoit, who almost never scores. And a late game rip from Max Pacioretty, who was playing in just his 41st game of the season for a team whose highest hopes for him were “maybe he’ll be healthy in the playoffs so he can chip in?” Well, he’s healthy.
• Knies scored three to immediately demonstrate that he’s the most threatening “fifth forward” they’ve had over the past nine years, and Bobby McMann finally played his best game of the series in Game 6, winning the puck on a half-dozen forechecks where it was 50/50 at best.
But to get back to an earlier reference, more important than any of these individual solid showings is that these players have felt included because their coach has insisted on it. Berube talks about them, he uses them, and so the blend has happened gradually but steadily.
Not many coaches in the league would’ve had the Domi line on the ice in the defensive zone in overtime for Game 2, but Berube has always insisted on using everybody. He did it again at 2-2 with six minutes left in Game 6, which leads to the Pacioretty goal.
By ice time Steven Lorentz was their 12th most-used forward in the series, and he averaged over 12 minutes of ice time per game, a wild distribution that previous iterations of the Leafs could never have imagined. So, while we’re giving Berube credit, let’s give Brad Treliving some for giving the coaches so many forwards they legitimately want to use. Benoit was their least-used defenceman in the series, and he averaged 18:30 per night, while the team’s most-used defenceman (McCabe) only played four minutes more. The ice time distribution has been incredibly spread out.
When the Leafs lost Game 5, Berube made explicit efforts to drive the point home. “It’s on everybody on the team. I get it. That’s all I hear around here: core, core, core, the Core Four. But, it’s on everybody on the team. We’re a team, it’s on the whole team. It’s not just four guys.”
Here are two things that I think are true, which I never would’ve thought possible in a scenario where the Leafs won a playoff round:
• They didn’t get great goaltending. Stolarz is 12th in the playoffs with a .901 save percentage. According to Moneypuck, he was 12th of 25 goalies in goals saved above expected, with a rating of a somehow precise 0.00. In total, he stopped exactly what you’d expect an average NHL goalie to stop.
• Toronto’s stars were just OK, and that’s only if you average it out — they were good in the first few games, and seemed to get tighter as the series went on. This is very general, as play by player certainly varied. I’m just not sure any of them changed how we feel about their late-series playoff abilities, and yet the Leafs still won.
But both of those above things can be true and the Leafs can still win, because the chasm between the old internal teams was finally bridged.
This is the sort of thing that can go unspoken about great players breaking through for team success: sometimes they need to be picked up, as they can’t be expected to carry a team through every moment. Whether it’s Max Talbot, Stephane Matteau, or hell, late-career Ray Allen hitting a clutch three to help out LeBron, even the biggest stars need guys farther down the lineup to have moments, to be relevant, to get those big names through and clear to the next big moment.
Yes, the Leafs will never go the distance without their best players playing well, but that’s true of any team. In the meantime, their coach continues to say the right things, and to encourage the growth around them, to give them them the best possible opportunities to succeed.
That bottom-up growth has seen the foliage of Team B cover up both the “B” and the “A,” allowing for just the word “Team” to remain visible. For years, fans said the Leafs needed more defending, more physicality, more depth. In 2025, they got more of those things, and those people were validated. The Leafs are finally more well-rounded.
Because en route to winning the second playoff round of the Core Four era, the Leafs did it while looking like a Team — just a capital-T Team — without any qualifiers or exceptions.
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