One burning question for each team ahead of 2025 WNBA season

Anticipation for the 2025 WNBA season has been felt since last year’s final buzzer.

With another strong draft class welcomed to the pros, the league is ready to make this campaign even better than the record-breaking one that came before it.

TORONTO — The Toronto Maple Leafs have 48 hours to prove they’re not who you think they are.

For the heart of their dressing room to show signs of a pulse.

Yes, it’s a touch too early to write the obituary of the 2024-25 edition of this team. But the way the players performed Wednesday night at Scotiabank Arena — standing around and getting steamrolled 6-1 in Game 5 by a Florida Panthers squad that only seems to be gaining confidence — rough drafts will be permitted.

Here lies a sluggish start. We are saddened to announce a series of egregious errors by star players. It is with a heavy heart that we report an avalanche of nine consecutive unanswered goals by the champions, piled on top of the battered and bewildered Leafs like shovelfuls of dirt on the grave.

The Maple Leafs walked into the most important home playoff game of the franchise’s past 23 years and gave the type of effort that would trigger eye rolls and talk-radio rants had it happened on a sleepy November Tuesday in Columbus.

And yet, with the pattern this era’s core has shown over what is now nine run-it-back springs, maybe this was nothing more than a scheduled loss after all.

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Certainly, the Leafs loyalists, who gobbled up every last ticket to Game 5 and arrived more giddy than nervous, weren’t hurling boos by Period 2 and glumly filing out the exits with 13-plus minutes in regulation because this was an anomaly.

A singular laid egg.

“I don’t think we gave them much reason to stick around,” said Auston Matthews, minutes after a No. 34 Justin Bieber–designed uniform was tossed onto the ice in disgust.

Matthews was only speaking about Wednesday’s quiet-then-angry-then-absent crowd. But the captain of this listing ship could just as easily be referring to a history of blown series leads, of prime opportunities squandered, and of a tortured fan base that has shown so much more resilience than the heroes that wear their favourite laundry.

Did it cross pending free agent Mitch Marner’s mind that this could possibly be his final home game in Toronto, his last time suiting up and trying to do right by the team he loved as a boy?

“No. No thoughts of that at all,” said Marner, trying to reset his mind and body for Game 6. “Go home, flush it down the toilet.”

Which is the appropriate place to deposit a performance this foul.

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Matthews, who had previously had the crutch of his strong defensive work to lean on, turned over the puck deep in his own zone on Florida’s opening strike.

Marner attempted a blind, spinning, cross-ice, backhand pass at his own blueline that landed smack on Gustav Forsling’s tape and was in Joseph Woll’s net two passes later.

“Sloppy play. Not hard enough working. Giving away too many opportunities around our net. There’s a good list of it,” Marner said. “I don’t think anyone’s happy about it.”

Only the experienced Panthers — who are flying home smelling blood, spotting the slumped shoulders, and seeing the rewards of inflicting their punishing, predictable brand of hockey on a team that reached the uncharted territory of six playoff wins and began to crack.

“I don’t think they came any harder than they have. I think we let them come tonight. We stood around and watched,” Leafs coach Craig Berube lamented.

“They outskated us, really. They had the puck, won the races. Like, we just played slow. They were fast. They were on us. They were hungrier. That’s the first period — and that sets the tone.”

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The tone in the Toronto room post-loss was one of regret mixed with an attempt to speak confidence into existence. Hey, they’ve been good on the road. And they’ve never lost four in a row all season.

“They owned us today,” William Nylander said. “We gotta try to get back at them in Florida.”

Give them a DeLorean, and the Maple Leafs 1.21-gigawatts their way back to Game 3, when they held leads of 2-0 and 3-1, then let their opponent off the mat.

That night, at his post-game podium, forever nemesis Brad Marchand praised-slash-trolled the Maple Leafs for developing a “killer instinct.”

In hindsight, the eldest player in this divisional tilt was more sincere after Game 2 in Toronto.

“These series can change on a dime,” a prophetic Marchand warned the last time the Cats walked out of Scotiabank Arena. The champs were down 2-0.

That was only a week ago. Feels like a month.

“We just fed into what makes them successful. Thought they won the net fronts tonight. You know, I thought they competed harder and won more puck battles,” Matthews said.

“I don’t really think there’s any excuse or explanation. The only thing we can do is regroup and reset, go out, and we got to win a game to keep our season alive.”

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Twenty-four different players have scored in this series.

Matthews isn’t one of them.

He’s had 10 games now to put a puck past Sergei Bobrovsky in a playoff game and has come up empty.

“I don’t look at myself as, like, a one-dimensional player. If I’m not scoring, I’m trying to do all the other little things that make the team successful, that make myself successful, and just try to be an all-around complete player,” Matthews said.

“So, I’m going to continue to push and try to score, obviously, and keep shooting. But all the other little details of my game, I want to do at a high level as well.”

Berube knows Matthews and Marner’s level was low Wednesday, but he’s not going to start criticizing his stars individually now.

“I’m not gonna look at a certain group of players. It’s everybody, myself included. There’s mistakes, a lot of mistakes. And mistakes happen in games, but it’s the way they happened tonight that’s disappointing more than anything,” Berube said. “(The top line) has done a good job up until tonight against that (Aleksander Barkov) line, and that’s part of their job.

“Tonight wasn’t a good game for anybody. Anybody. All of us.”

Not when Joseph Woll gets mercy-pulled in front of a half-empty barn in the third period and Matt Murray makes his first playoff action in 1,743 days.

And not when the strongest declaration of ownership of Wednesday’s debacle comes from one of the humble role players affixed late to make this core feel different.

“I’ll take responsibility,” straight-shooting defenceman Chris Tanev said. “I need to be better. So, if I’m a minus player, probably not gonna win the game. It’s on me. I’ll take responsibility for the game.”

What can the Maple Leafs do, then, in the next 48 hours to make us crumple our obituaries? To give Marner another home game in Toronto? To give all those frustrated fans another morsel of hope?

“Play better,” Tanev said.

They better.

Fox’s Fast Five

• With Toronto down to its final life, do we see Anthony Stolarz in Game 6?

Woll is certainly not the issue here. He was given literally zero run support in his last six-plus periods. But it’s a question worth asking now that the Leafs are staring at elimination.

• The Panthers are drawing on very recent experience during this claw-back.

No, they’ve never rallied from a 2-0 series deficit. But they did trail the New York Rangers 2-1 in the Eastern Conference Final before winning Game 4 at home, Game 5 on the road, then wrapping the series in Game 6 at home last spring.

“This is where we’re supposed be,” coach Paul Maurice said calmly pre-game. “The setup is exactly the Ranger game. We were down in the series, came back, went into New York. It’s harnessing that excitement about it. That’s kind of how we’re moving around each other today.”

• What would Maurice say if someone told him that they’d hold Matthews without a goal heading into Game 5?

“What’s the series at?” the coach replied.

“Doesn’t f—— matter. Jonah Gadjovich scored that goal (in Game 3). We didn’t take it from him and give it to Barkov. Nobody cares.”

Except for Leafs fans who have seen 24 players not named Matthews find the back of the net in this series.

• Nick Robertson scored (again!) coming out of the press box. A nice one, too. Albeit in garbage time. The legend continues…

• Max Domi has taken six unnecessary penalties in five games. Quibble with a couple of the calls if you like, but that’s too many.

Can the Leafs continue to dress Domi in this series?

“It’s definitely an issue we’ve got to talk about and discuss and figure out what we’re going to do there,” Berube said.