SIMMONS: Maple Leafs sweep past Stanley Cup champions in Game 1

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On a nearly perfect playoff night, here ends the losing streak of points and begins the future of Mitch Marner and the Maple Leafs.

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Marner and all the Leafs.

All of them not named Kyle Clifford.

The Leafs couldn’t have started the Stanley Cup playoffs better, stronger, faster, more outright than they did with a shocking Game 1 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning on Monday night at Scotiabank Arena, maybe the most impressive win of the Sheldon Keefe era.

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This wasn’t just a huge win for the club, it was huge for the manager whose playoff record was spotty and huge for so many Leaf players in need of a narrative change that has been around for far too long.

This does not mean that they will win the series. The first victory never wins any series. But the winners of the first game take 70% of the playoff series. So that’s for the Leafs. A landslide victory. A knockout in the first game. The kind of victory that hardly anyone saw coming.

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It was one thing to win the opening game against the two-time Stanley Cup champions. It was another thing to make champions seem slow, vulnerable, like a team whose time may have come and gone. It’s only one game, but what a game it was for the Leafs, who almost fell behind and possibly went out before the game even started.

Coach Keefe made the curious decision to start veteran Clifford in the Leafs’ fourth row instead of the rather professional Jason Spezza and that decision could have backfired on him. Clifford was penalized in the first half for tackling (a foul of more than five minutes and a misconduct in the game in less than seven minutes) in an absolutely undisciplined and unnecessary penalty and, had it not been for an excellent penalty, who knows what where could this game have gone.

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That mistake was on Keefe. The rest of the night he couldn’t do anything wrong.

But after the slaughter, in which the Leafs had four solid scoring chances with a man down, the Leafs took a 1-0 lead on a rare goal by defenseman Jake Muzzin. That was the beginning. It just continued from there.

But Marner’s second-half goal wasn’t just symbolic, it was almost necessary. He has been a long time coming. It was like a statement for the electric but tiny Marner. It had been 18 playoff games without a goal for Marner, who had been reminded of this too often.

When Marner scored to make it 4-0, it wasn’t just the score that had Leaf fans cheering, but who scored and how they scored. It was time to part with the past. Marner’s goal came after setting up an earlier Auston Matthews goal, the first of two, after making the play that ended with David Kampf scoring on a shorthanded goal.

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Marner and William Nylander were the best of so many great Leafs on this night. Marner on even strength, on the power play, with a short man. Yet from the start, Nylander, playing left-back rather than right-back, back-row rather than higher up the lineup, seemed unstoppable. He has a chance to score in the first minute of play, two more significant chances in the first 20 minutes that included a breakaway. He did not register a point. Not every night is defined by the game sheet.

Throughout the game, the Leafs looked smarter, more aggressive and sharper with the puck, winning the little battles that cost them in recent playoff years and winning the big battles. And really, Tampa has to be wondering today what hit them so hard and so fast. What happened when you had nothing resembling an answer.

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And the expected big one-sided battle in goal between world goalkeeper Andrei Vasilevskiy and Jack Campbell, who is still trying to figure out who he is, was one-sided in favor of Campbell. The usually impenetrable Vasilevskiy was beaten to a blocked slapshot by Jake Muzzin, hockey’s greatest shooter took him down with a power play bullet, the unlikely Kampf took him down on a breakaway, then a goal from Marner, who used his unique skills going from side to side. lateral to beat Vasilevskiy from the slot. That was before Matthews scored again, to make it 5-0 on a play that Vasilevskiy completely missed.

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The Leafs scored just as hard, scored on the power play, scored behind, and scored far more than anyone could have expected.

This was a game you take notes on. This was a game the Leafs hadn’t played in years. This was a game where the Leafs made Victor Hedman look normal, made Vasilevskiy look like another goalie, made Nikita Kucherov look invisible when he wasn’t on the power play. Even local great Steven Stamkos missed a completely empty goal and was greeted with a chant of his name.

Those things don’t all happen overnight.

The game resorted to stupidity late, the usual hockey nonsense about what to do when you’re behind by too many goals, so everyone started throwing punches late when Lightning frankly didn’t know what else to do.

The fights may have been the only thing Lightning won on Monday night.

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