Of the five goals the core combined for, only one came on the power play. They were slick in transition and effective and dominant with the puck in the offensive zone, playing with, you guessed it, almost no hesitation.
Tavares led the charge with his first playoff hat trick. In Game 2, Matthews, Marner, Tavares, Nylander and Rielly took this team on their backs and combined for an impressive 14 points.
Outside of Auston Matthews, none of the Leafs’ high-powered core played to their potential in game 1. That they could turn the page on game 1 so quickly was important. There was literally no hesitation in the Leafs’ play in Game 2. One of the most telling assessments of the Leafs’ ugly Game 1 performance came from Ryan O’Reilly: “We just had a little hesitation in our game, we were thinking a little too much,” he said. They made efforts to get in front of every shot to protect Ilya Samsonov and play with urgency in their defending and puck movement that was absent in Game 1. It wasn’t just the offensive production, though, that saw the Leafs coming out to play. Tavares and Nylander added two more goals in the period, equalling Tampa’s total in Game 1. Marner confidently and calmly fired home a power-play goal with a slap shot 47 seconds into the game, which sent a buzz throughout the Scotiabank Arena that didn’t really dissipate, well, at all. And in Game 2, the Leafs did what they had to do by flipping the script with one of their most impressive periods of the season.
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