Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz called out his team after they lost to the Seattle Kraken 4-3 in overtime on Saturday.

Stolarz was fed up with the fact that his team isn’t rolling along and playing their game to the best of their abilities. Although it may be early given that they are just six games into the regular season, he felt that they weren’t working hard enough and that was a major factor in why they didn’t come away with two points.

Stolarz took exception to the fact his teammates were not doing enough to win the net-front battles.

“ It’s just playing hard. Maybe we can take a page out of their book and start getting to the net,” Stolarz said post-game. “For us, we like to go low to high and shoot, but for their goalie, it’s like playing catch in the yard: you’re seeing everything. We’re not making it difficult.  We made it difficult in the third, and look what happened. We came out, tied the game, got a point out of it, almost scored with five seconds left. But it’s a little, too little, too late.

“And I think, you know, even though we’re six games into the season, enough’s enough and we kind of gotta start picking it up here.”

One thing that particularly upset Stolarz was the lack of protection in the crease when the opposition comes barreling in, which occurred again during the second period when Mason Marchment crashed the net. Brandon Carlo and Jake McCabe were in the vicinity but didn’t react right away, so Stolarz took matters into his own hands by getting in some shoves on Marchment after the whistle.

This has been an issue with Stolarz ever since he joined the team and he challenged his teammates to do a better job of making life difficult for the opposing goaltender.

“I’m not happy. Guys are gonna run me and I’m gonna try to stand up for myself,” Stolarz said about getting hit by Marchment. “ I heard the refs say we got a power play and there’s really not much I can do to him on the ground.  Kudos to the guys who were there and got down with him, but  I think we gotta start going into the cage a little harder, make it harder for their goalies. It’s not fun. I don’t like having 225 pound guys landing on me, so hopefully we learn a lesson here.”

After Josh Mahura scored the overtime winner, Stolarz smashed his stick in frustration. There was a multitude of factors that led to that moment of anger coming out on the ice, with one of them being that his teammates made it too easy for Mahura to get a clear-cut look and score the winner with ease.

He stated that the reason for his outburst was that he feels the Leafs are not living up to the style of play he knows they are capable of.

“ It’s just overall. I mean, how many top points are we gonna leave out there?” he said. “ Being here last year, seeing the team we had, seeing how far we were able to go, and the potential.  The potential’s there. We have the skill, we have the grit, we have the grind.  It’s just frustrating that we just can’t put together right now.”