What’s different about the Maple Leafs in this year’s playoffs

Through eight playoff games in the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Toronto Maple Leafs are 6-2. They’ve upped their goals-per-game from 3.26 to 3.5, they’re allowing five fewer shots against per game, and they’re just generally finding a way. 

Maybe the Panthers will figure them out, and win this thing in six or seven. Maybe so much of what has gone right for the Leafs will suddenly start to go the other way. Who can say? But the following is not a prediction, it’s an observation. If you’ve watched this team closely all year, it’s not just that they look different from previous seasons, which has been the big question they’ve tried to answer all year long. It’s that they also look different from themselves in the regular season in certain, playoff-like ways.

Let me elaborate. Here’s how the Leafs are different through eight playoff games from the regular season.

Small area passing, particularly on breakouts

One complaint my cohost on Real Kyper and Bourne has often had about the Leafs is that they don’t pass it particularly well. And to Nick’s defence, they do have a bunch of guys whose preference is to shoot over pass, which offensively isn’t such a bad thing. But it could be frustrating to watch on breakouts, where they would so often look for a stretch pass, or just bank it off the glass and out into the neutral zone. 

But so far versus two hard forechecks from Ottawa and Florida, they’re also having relative success making small-area passes that allow their linemates the time and space to get the puck moving out of the zone. Using passing data from Stathletes: the Leafs are averaging over three additional passes per 60 in the defensive zone so far in the playoffs, and again, that’s against playoff teams with good forechecks.

When they use their linemates beyond the defensive zone, it can look as pretty as the Max Domi goal, where four Leafs touch it, and none of them skates with it for more than a few strides:

Unwavering commitment to defence

Since the trade deadline which saw the Leafs add Brandon Carlo and Scott Laughton, the Leafs haven’t been a whole lot of fun for offensive players to play against. That was March 7, and between then and the season’s end the Leafs were fourth in goals allowed at 5-on-5, allowing just one more than Winnipeg and St. Louis who were tied for second. 

In the regular season, the Leafs were 11th in shot blocks, averaging 16.41 per game. In the playoffs, they’re averaging 21.15, a whopping .02 out of first place (Washington). By raw totals, they’ve blocked 41 more shots than Dallas, who has the next-most behind them.

It’s just really hard to get pucks through against the Leafs right now. 

Physical play

They’ve wanted to have heavyweights in the past, and we’ve seen them in the playoffs with guys like Kyle Clifford and Ryan Reaves. But this year they have had more of a team commitment to being physical, which they’ve taken to another level in the playoffs. 

Regular season hits per game: 23.73

Playoff hits per game: 32.14

It’s softening up defences for them to create offensive space, with which they can be so dangerous.

It’s not new that the Leafs are physically large, in the league’s top five in both height and weight. The way they’re throwing their size around is making it hard for opponents to play the bully, and in the playoffs, that posture has been tough to stand up to.

Back-end offence

Going in to Game 2, here are two boards we ran on the broadcast:

In Game 2, the Leafs defence tallied three more points, two assists from Playoff Morgan Rielly and another for Oliver Ekman-Larsson. 

Here’s the reality: the earlier point I made about how they’ve settled in on defence has given them the security to make the right plays on offence, including jumping up in the rush when that opportunity arises. When people say good teams are built from the net out, that’s what this is. You defend well, you trust your team defence, you can activate more, and suddenly you create more offence, too. 

And finally…

A calm resilience

Wednesday night I saw a tweet shared by my guy Ben Ennis, which he posted for the purpose of talking about the Leafs resilience (as he says in that thread):

They don’t go away when it starts going wrong. We saw Max Pacioretty score just minutes after David Perron tied it up for the Sens in Game 6 of the first round, just like we saw Mitch Marner score 17 seconds after Florida tied it up in Game 2. 

We’ve seen Toronto’s goalie clipped and leave the game, we’ve seen officials call almost entirely fabricated penalties, and we’ve seen soft goals go in against them. And still, there doesn’t seem to be any real panic to their game, they just keep playing the right way, and trust that generally, the results will shake out in their favour. They’re behaving in the image of their coach.

All year long we held the “Are the Leafs different” debate, and sure, more often than not the answer was yes. They had better defence, better goaltending and some more team grit. We believed those things would help them incrementally in the playoffs, and when you lose by a goal in Game 7 overtime (as they did last season), any incremental gains would be meaningful.

That they’ve taken strides to be different from not just previous years, but also this regular season, should raise some eyebrows. It could all change in a flash, but as things stand after a couple games in the second round, the Leafs are presenting the best version of a Core Four era team yet.

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