DISCLAIMER: The ‘top stories’ are simply ranked based on how much traffic they garnered for our site over the past calendar year. This is not an opinionated Top 10.
Many of the stories that made up our most viewed articles of 2025 included some variation of trades (no surprise) free agency (no surprise) and postmortems after another playoff loss (again, no surprise). This article falls into the latter category.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were up 2-0 on the Florida Panthers in their series and had them down 3-1 halfway through Game 3. From that point on, it felt like a lost series. The Leafs lost three games in a row after going up 2-0 in the series, and while they clawed their way to a Game 6 victory on the road, they may as well not have shown up to the rink for their 6-1 shellacking at the hands of the Panthers in Game 7.
We covered Craig Berube’s press conference at the end-of-season media availability, and when asked about what went wrong in Game 7, he kept pointing to the loss of structure. Below is an excerpt from the article of what Berube said.
“The last couple of days, there’s a lot of things that go through your mind for these big games,” Berube said. “You may not have your A-game in these games, but what you have to rely on is your structure. When I look at these games and I look at the situations that hurt us, we lost our structure. Structure is very important, and if you don’t lose your structure, you can get through without your A game.”
While it didn’t make fans feel any better, the struggles from May seem like a walk in the park compared to the turmoil the Leafs organization has found themselves in to start the 2025-26 season. Obviously, that’s not something any fan cares to hear about at the time, but the way the Leafs have played so far in 2025-26, they should feel lucky that they even got to Game 7 of the second round in 2024-25.
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