Steve Simmons from the Toronto Sun confirms that Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas was in the box alongside his trusted assistants, Jason Spezza and
Brandon Pridham.
Sheldon Keefe’s face was beyond crimson red as he jumped up and down behind the Maple Leafs bench.
torontosun.com
When the puck crossed the goal line, and the frenzy of screaming and celebration began, Sheldon Keefe’s face was beyond crimson red as he jumped up and down behind the Maple Leafs bench, shaking hands, leaping and hugging his fellow coaches.
Knowing, in that single explosive moment, that the intensity of the longtime pressure had been reduced.
It wasn’t all that different in the box in which general manager Kyle Dubas sat alongside his trusted assistants, Jason Spezza and Brandon Pridham. When captain John Tavares’ unlikely shot banked off Darren Raddysh’s skate and slid past Andrei Vasilevskiy in overtime to give the Maple Leafs their first playoff series victory in 19 years, Dubas leaped, swore and excitedly shouted, his face an even brighter shade of red, still jumping and trying to hug Spezza and Pridham as they were bopping up and down on their own.
All of them knowing that suddenly all those years of answering all those questions and dealing with so many doubts — many of them legitimate — were temporarily over.
There should be no talk now of replacing Dubas as general manager or Keefe as coach or Brendan Shanahan as president of the club, especially after a night in which so many of their decisions eventually slayed the hockey dragon that has been the Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Leafs didn’t outplay the Lightning in the series — and if Jon Cooper is involved, they certainly didn’t outcoach him — but they won the mandatory four of six games, three of them in Tampa, all three of those in overtime.
In a first-round kind of way, it reminded me of the previous time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup. That was in 1993. The Montreal Canadiens were not the best team in the NHL. They just happened to win 10 straight overtime games, with Patrick Roy in goal, to eventually find a way to beat Wayne Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings in the Stanley Cup final.