Sheldon Keefe NOT HAPPY at Media Conference After Blowing Lead To Florida Panthers

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S. Harper
April 6, 2022 (10:55)

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It sucks when your favorite team loses, it's even worse when they blow a big lead. That's exactly what happened tonight between the Florida Panthers and visiting Toronto Maple Leafs.

In a bit of a shocker the Leafs beat up on the two time defending Stanley cup champions and wanted to continue that by doing the same to the powerhouse Florida Panthers.

The Leafs looked like they were going to blow the Florida Panthers away, with some fans shocked and leaving the game early. Lesson learned though, you never leave until it's over especially playing the Toronto Maple Leafs who are notorious for blowing leads.

That's exactly what happened the Panthers battled back down 5-1 to win 7-6 in overtime. After the embarrassing loss the Leafs media asked Toronto Maple Leafs Head Coach Sheldon Keefe:

"What went wrong tonight when you looked like you had this in the bag? "

Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe replied saying:

Obviously, we go from being on a breakaway with a chance to make it 6-1, don't score, and follow it up with a too-many-men on the ice penalty right after. That starts to snowball. Inside of that, we had some pretty terrible penalty killing.

I am not going to focus on that kind of stuff. I am going to focus on the fact that we played another good hockey game today.

We were bad in moments with the penalties. You can't take a too-many-men penalty. You can't give up a shorthanded goal on a clear shot from the blue line. You can't have your fourth line in the third period. You can't chase the puck on the penalty kill. All of those kinds of things we can't do in those moments. Maybe those are a sign of the fatigue factor coming into today. I don't know. Last night, we didn't do any of those types of things. I am going to watch those kinds of things.

For me, this last little stretch we have been on Florida at home, Boston on the road, Tampa, and Florida here I was looking to come out of this segment with a sense of where we are at as a team and whether we can compete with the very best in our division. I think that answer is unequivocally yes. That is all I am going to take out of this.

On what he liked about how the team handled this recent stretch:

Just confident, committed, and resilient. I will use resilient because that showed up again tonight. Our powerplay wasn't good in that third period in the second half of the game. There is a critical moment there where our guys have to gather themselves. We had another chance on the powerplay and another chance to tie the game. They executed and got it done for us.

That, to me, is another terrific thing. In that moment, our guys needed to push back. Our best people needed to execute in a critical time. They did. That gets us to overtime and gets us a very important point.

I have said it 100 times. To me, the game is a tie, and overtime is a crapshoot. John misses his breakaway, and they score on their 2-on-1 that is the way it goes.

The resilient piece today I like. Obviously, we hate how we gave up the lead and all of those kinds of things. There is a lot to take away from that, but we did a ton of really good things here today on a back-to-back against the top team in our conference.

I am feeling really good about where we are at as a team.