Frustration mounting as Leafs fail again in bid for first win in three games

It’s only the beginning of March, but you can already feel the exasperation bubbling in the Toronto Maple Leafs’ dressing room.

The Leafs don’t have much going on right now in the wake of Saturday’s 5-2 loss to the Washington Capitals in the Stadium Series at Annapolis, part of their four-game road trip. They’re 0-1-2 in the last week, third worst in the NHL, ahead of only the New York Islanders and Calgary Flames, and off to their worst stretch since going 0-1-3 in mid-January. They have seven goals in their last three games and six players have accounted for all of them.

“We’ve got to just figure a way to be sick of losing,” said Auston Matthews. “I know I’m sick of losing. There’s a lot of guys that are sick of losing. There’s a difference between playing hard and playing hard and smart. We’ve got to execute our game all the way through the lineup, myself included.”

There were no good-job, good-effort backslaps after this one even though the Leafs did substantially tidy things up on the defensive end. There was no epidemic of odd-man rushes like we saw in their previous two games. No breakdown of the power play to allow yet another backbreaking short-handed goal.

The Leafs were outshot by just five in the game (34-29) but only had seven in the first period and had few good chances to score the tying goal they needed early on.

As goaltender Frederik Andersen quietly intoned, “If you don’t have the effort, that’s an automatic. Every team in this league ought to have the effort. I think the effort was a bit better but it comes down to small details, to bringing everything together. … This is awful. It’s not fun.”

“It’s a league of results, right?” said Zach Hyman, who scored one of the two goals. “It’s frustrating we’re not getting the results that we want but I thought our effort was way better and we’ve got to take that with us. At the end of the day, we didn’t get the two points and that’s what we play for and what we want.”

So through three games, Hyman has two goals, and Kadri, Moore, van Riemsdyk, Marner, and Bozak each have one. Marner has one assist and two points. Morgan Rielly, with two assists, is the only other player with more than one point. Tomas Plekanec and Connor Brown remain pointless. William Nylander has one assist.

With their offense struggling, the Sabres have only led for half a period in the last three games.

“Sometimes you do squeeze your stick. You’re an offensive player and want to contribute,” said coach Mike Babcock. “You feel better about yourself and your contribution to the team when you do. It comes down to hard work. We have to work our way out of these things. Even the guys who aren’t scoring have to find a way to work through it.”

“We all need to relax,” Matthews said. “We have a lot of good players on this team. It will come. It will come. It’s frustrating it’s not coming right now. We want to see results. We’re working hard but sometimes working hard is not enough.”

From his view, Andersen said the Leafs need to force more traffic around the opposing net like their opponents are doing to him.

“You’re not going to beat goalies if you don’t have anyone in front of the net,” he said. “I think Braden Holtby saw every shot today. It’s not to be on anyone but we’ve got recognize that as a team. … Man, we’ve got to get in front. I thought I had a guy in front of me the whole game as soon as they were in the zone. That’s what the good teams do. You’ve got to fight and earn the shots you see as a goalie in this league and we’ve got to make it tougher on the other team’s goalie.”