Brad Marchand puppeteers Leafs’ loss of composure in Game 3 collapse

Perhaps no fan base understands the painful, singular moments that can swing a playoff series like Toronto Maple Leafs fans can. The Kerry Fraser high stick. The Nazem Kadri suspension(s). The horrific collision between John Tavares and Corey Perry. On and on the misery goes. The Leafs’ post-expansion history masochistically lugs these memories around like a rusty set of golf clubs.

What transpired in Game 3 between the Leafs and Boston Bruins Wednesday at Scotiabank Arena presented Toronto with yet another one of those cursed, “Why us?” playoff moments –  and a corresponding lapse in focus. With Toronto up 1-0 late in the second period following a Matthew Knies goal, Bruins captain Brad Marchand got tangled up with Toronto’s Tyler Bertuzzi seemingly for the 10^th time so far in the series. They jostled, Marchand hauled down Bertuzzi, and pretty much everyone in the building called a penalty.

The play appeared so open-and-shut that the Leafs stopped skating for a second. Goaltender Ilya Samsonov was in the midst of a phenomenal game, having stopped breakaways from Pavel Zacha in the first and James van Riemsdyk in the second, but when Bertuzzi crashed to the ice the and crowed roared in expectation of a penalty, Samsonov’s posture appeared to relax, almost like he briefly thought the play was dead. It wasn’t. The officials called no penalty.

The Bruins’ Trent Frederic seized the opportunity, swooped in toward the top of the circle and let a relatively harmless wrist shot go. It beat Samsonov’s blocker side cleanly, vacuumed the oxygen out of the building and tied the game.

It wasn’t even the deciding goal in the end, but it qualified as another one of those small turning points that hijacks Toronto’s composure during high-stakes hockey and changes the momentum of a game. The Leafs were chasing Game 3 from that point onward.

The ceaselessly savvy Marchand was the puppeteer, whether you agreed with the non-call or not. He helped Boston gain an early third-period lead by bouncing a shot off Samsonov’s pad and right to Jake DeBrusk for a go-ahead goal. The Leafs tied the game when Bertuzzi deflected a seeing-eye shot from Morgan Rielly, but with the emotion surging in Scotiabank Arena, they once again momentarily lost focus, and Marchand punished them. Just 28 seconds after Toronto’s equalizer, with the Leafs scrambling in their zone, he corralled a feed from Danton Heinen and roofed it over Samsonov’s shoulder to immediately snatch back the lead. Marchand added the insurance goal on an empty-netter in a 4-2 victory to put Boston up 2-1 in the series.

Marchand, the only active Bruin left from all three series wins over the Leafs in 2013, 2018 and 2019, has made an outsized impact on the 2024 edition, on and off the scoresheet. He has six points in three games, he’s drawn a couple Toronto penalties, and he’s lived on the right side of the line himself, somehow evading calls despite being at the center of many melees.

“Everybody in the playoffs targets the other teams’ best players. He gets targeted, and he still manages to get under people’s skin, and yet he doesn’t cross the line,” said Bruins head coach Jim Montgomery. “You’ve just got to tip your hat to him because of his maturation as a hockey player and as a person.”

“I don’t really think I’ve been trying to ride a line, if anything the last number of years, it’s taken a long time to try to just play,” Marchand said. “I don’t always do it. ‘Bert’ and I get tied up one shift, but outside of that, I’m not really in the mix with anything. I’m just trying to play, play a good team game. At this time of year, it gets so emotional. I’m an emotional player, we have a lot of emotional players on our team. You need to be able to keep that in [check]. I think we’ve done a really good job of that as a team. We’re playing really hard between the whistles and we’re not going over that line. We just have to continue to do that.”

Having played 24 career games against the Leafs in the postseason now, piling up 27 points, he seems to prey on their emotion. If Toronto doesn’t figure out how to maintain composure when he’s on the ice, a potential back-and-forth series could turn into a short one instead.

“You’ve got to play through it,” said Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe. “You’ve got to recognize he’s a world-class player, both in ability and how he plays, in the gamesmanship and everything, and he’s been in the league long enough As you can see, he gets calls. It’s unbelievable, actually, how it goes… I don’t think there’s another player in this series that gets away with taking out Bertuzzi’s legs the way that he does. It’s an art, and he’s elite at it. So we have to manage our way through that, avoid putting ourselves in situations where he can put us in those spots.”

It’s not like Game 3 was a one-sided pummelling. The scoring chances were relatively even at 5-on-5. The Leafs continue to look like the Bruins’ equal – if not superior – in the physicality department, outhitting the Bruins 68-65 in Game 3. But when your power play is 1 for 11 in the series, and you’re still waiting for a crucial contributor like William Nylander to return, your margin for error is tiny. That’s where the “small lapses,” as Rielly called them Wednesday, become so important.

Especially when the future Hall of Famer wearing No. 63 for the other side is a master at orchestrating them.