Here we go again.
The Toronto Maple Leafs and Tampa Bay Lightning will meet in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the second year in a row and, once again, it’s the Leafs that are favored to win the best-of-7 series.
If you’re an avid NHL fan, you know the backstory here.
The Leafs are the league’s richest team and have all the talent in the world, but they’ve not advanced past Round 1 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2004.
The Lightning are on a very different path, having appeared in three straight Stanley Cup Finals and winning two in a row (2019-20, 2020-21).
The tenor before this series is starkly similar to what we saw last spring when these two teams battled for seven games.
The Leafs are a deserving favorite with the better roster and are coming off the better season, but the Lightning are impossible to count out.
Nonetheless, it’s Toronto that will enter Game 1 as a -155 favorite to win the series and a -164 favorite to win the curtain-raiser on Tuesday night.
Lightning vs. Maple Leafs pick
(7:30 p.m. ET)
It’s been said all season long by bettors.
There is no team that is more difficult to handicap in hockey than the Tampa Bay Lightning.
After making it all the way back to the Stanley Cup Finals for the third time in a row, there were plenty of people that questioned if Tampa would be up for another 82-game campaign followed by a grueling postseason.
The Bolts seemed to quiet those doubters with a 35-16-2 record through their first 53 games.
At that point, the Lightning had basically secured their playoff spot and with the Boston Bruins playing at a historic pace, Tampa and Toronto were all but guaranteed to meet in Round 1.
In other words, Tampa and Toronto played pretty low-stakes games for three months.
Whether that’s why the Bolts struggled to an 11-14-4 record down the stretch remains to be seen, but you can forgive the Lightning for taking their foot off the pedal after everything they’ve been through.
But the other side of the argument is that the Lightning struggled in the last 10 weeks of the regular season because they’re just not a great hockey team anymore.
Not only did the Bolts lose key pieces like Yanni Gourde, Blake Coleman, Ryan McDonagh and Ondrej Palat over the past two offseasons, but they’ve played so much hockey in such a condensed amount of time, that the wear-and-tear factor could finally be catching up to them.
Whatever the case may be with Tampa, we should feel pretty good about what to expect out of Toronto.
The Leafs were one of the league’s best teams from start to finish and will go into this postseason riding a four-game winning streak and a 10-3-2 stretch over their last 15 games.
There’s no questioning that the Leafs are the better team and are deserving favorites, but there are some matchup issues in a best-of-7 series.
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For one, everything that Toronto does well to get separation against its opposition, Tampa Bay does well, too.
Both teams have terrific power plays, their star players can be the difference on any given night and they both got strong goaltending all season.
That said, the Lightning do have an ace in the hole with goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy.
While Ilya Samsonov was consistent for the Leafs this season, he’s clearly the B-side of this goaltending matchup and it’s anybody’s guess how he’ll react to the extended break after he sat out the last two games of the regular season.
The Leafs are the better team, but Vasilevskiy raises the floor of the Lightning enough to make them a live underdog in what will be a pressure-packed game for Toronto.
Lightning vs. Maple Leafs prediction
Lightning moneyline (+130, FanDuel)