This is about to go one of two ways for the 2025-26 Toronto Maple Leafs, who had one of their own — an invaluable one of their own — direct a spotlight at some of their early-season flaws.
Not only have the Maple Leafs not done a good enough job sticking up for one another through six games — firstly Stolarz and secondly prospect Easton Cowan — they don’t make life stressful enough on the opposing goaltender.
Furthermore, Stolarz questioned the effort being exerted from the skaters in front of him and suggested coach Craig Berube’s offensive scheme, which leans into point shots through traffic, might not be the most effective.
“Maybe we can take a page out of their book and start getting to the net. I mean, for us, we like to go low to high and shoot. But for their goalie, it’s like playing catch in the yard. He’s seeing everything,” a fiery Stolarz said following Saturday’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Seattle Kraken.
The Leafs prefer to calm the waters publicly, not stir them. Losing skids are blips, not crises. Behind the scenes, as we learned via Season 2 of Faceoff, Berube will bluntly rip his players’ effort. He’ll call them soft.
At the podium, however, the coach generally has his players’ backs. Even players in the doghouse from time to time (David Kämpf, Nick Robertson, et al.) will have their positive attributes accentuated in press availabilities.
As with any professional sports team, but maybe more so, the Leafs — who, as an organization, have been sensitive to “the narrative” around them — strive to keep all internal gripes locked inside the dressing room.
Not strung out on the lawn for passersby to pick at.
For Stolarz, who gets paid to stop the puck, to rip a weak backcheck or ask his forwards to go crash a crease 200 feet away? Well, that presser went down about as well in Leafs HQ as a fistful of saltines with no water.
Berube is a straight shooter. He’s also a believer of handling conflict internally. And of teammates having each other’s backs in all scrums, on the ice and against the backdrop.
The hardest truths are best served with no RECORD button in sight.
Think back to captain Auston Matthews walking into the home dressing room during the final intermission of Game 7 against the Florida Panthers last spring, pointing to a Prime Video cameraman and saying one word: “Out.”
And so, in predictable fashion, the Maple Leafs all played the nothing-to-see-here card Monday, when speaking for the first time since Stolarz vented.
“It’s frustration. We all prefer it stay in the room, but it happens,” Berube told the gathered media. “We’ve moved on from it.
The team addressed Stolarz comments and apparently landed on the same page: He’s a competitor. They’re all competitors. They’ll only get better moving forward.
“You can appreciate his passion, his fire. I mean, he’s a competitor and he’s a competitive guy, and obviously we all want to win and all want to help in that regard,” Matthews said.
“When you have a night like the other night, frustration builds. We’re all human; I think you can appreciate that. We’ve got to be better, and that’s the bottom line.”
Stolarz said he pulled William Nylander aside to clear the air after publicly criticizing his lack of backchecking on Josh Mahura’s winning breakaway.
“It’s all good. Look, we’re teammates. He’s a great guy. There’s nothing that we need to talk about here. Yeah, he talked to me after and it’s all good. It’s been no issue since,” Nylander said.
Said Stolarz: “He’s someone I admire and someone I respect deeply. There’s a reason he’s been in this league for so long. He’s a helluva player. He pushes me, and I push him.
“We’re a family in here, and we’re looking to push each other and get to our ultimate goal.”
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These Leafs have long talked about how tightly knit they are, how much they love each other.
And yet, they have lapses like Saturday, when Mason Marchment gets off easy for running Stolarz. The goalie defended big defencemen Brandon Carlo and Jake McCabe for not jumping Marchment when the Kraken forward was lying in the net he had just crashed.
“The guy’s down on his back. It’s not the UFC. You’re not going to start a ground-and-pound,” Stolarz said. “I know the guys have my back, and I have theirs.
“You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.”
Toronto’s reluctance to respond is hardly a one-off, though. The way Berube and GM Brad Treliving envision the game, they hate seeing opponents take liberties.
Two seasons ago, Timothy Liljegren suffered a high-ankle sprain when then-Bruin Brad Marchand tripped him into the boards. The Leafs offered zero punishment to the culprit.
Then-coach Sheldon Keefe said he “hated everything about it,” the free pass for injuring a Leaf. (Ironically, Keefe’s new squad, the Devils, are on deck for Tuesday’s Response Game, and surely the slightest slight to a Leaf will spark an overcompensation of aggression.)
Now, that troubling lack of stick-togetherness from 2024 has reared its head again. The difference here is a player piped up.
A player that probably feels even more empowered since he committed to the team with the longest and richest contract of his life.
And a player they can ill afford to lose to injury, considering the lack of starting goalie options should Stolarz go down.
“He’s incredibly important,” Morgan Rielly said. “On the ice, he brings that intensity, and he backs it up with this play. He’s been outstanding for us all last year, and here at the start of this year, and off the ice.
“I mean, you want that intensity. You want guys who care. You want guys who are motivated and who want to win — and he is that.”
Now that the Maple Leafs have reached this fork in the road, we should reserve judgment for their actions. As a creative-writing professor would put it: Show us, don’t tell us.
Only time will reveal if Stolarz’s airing of the grievances proves to be a galvanizing moment, a wakeup call that triggers harder effort, increased urgency, and a united group. Or if Stolarz’s bold, impromptu stray from the company line served more as a magnifying glass hovering over the fissures.
“I’m a vocal guy,” Stolarz said. “And I’m going to continue to be a vocal guy.”
As Berube searches for top-line chemistry, Max Domi moved to Matthews’ right wing at practice. This could spell more ice time for Nicolas Roy, who moves to 3C on a shutdown-type unit…. Calle Järnkrok appears likely to return to the fourth line, while Easton Cowan might go back to the press box …. After scoring Saturday, the Leafs’ power-play improved to 26th overall (14.3 per cent). The Devils’ penalty kill is off to an incredible start (95 per cent).
Maple Leafs’ projected lineup Tuesday vs. Devils:
Knies – Matthews – Domi
Maccelli – Tavares – Nylander
Joshua – Roy – McMann
Robertson – Lorentz – Järnkrok
