The Maple Leafs are back in the fight

The Maple Leafs lost the first two games of this series against the Bruins by a 12-4 aggregate score, falling into an 0-2 series pit from which only 13 percent of teams emerge. They were embarrassed twice in a row against a team with more playoff experience that had finished seven points ahead of them in the standings and looked primed to cruise.

Something changed in Game 3 on Monday. It wasn’t as simple as the series shifting from Boston to Toronto, but it wasn’t as radical as the Leafs flipping a switch and turning from an incompetent team to a good one. Their 4-2 win was a couple of days in the making.

It’s impossible to play well in the course of getting drubbed 5-1 and 7-3 in back-to-back games, but the run of play on those nights wasn’t quite that lopsided.

The Bruins were pretty dominant in Game 1. They controlled 65 percent of the shot attempts at even strength and had a 25-14 even-strength advantage in scoring chances. But even then, the high-danger chances that came right in front of the net favored the Leafs, 7-5. They consistently got pucks close to Tuukka Rask. They rarely finished, and goaltender Frederik Andersen (five goals allowed on 40 shots) didn’t keep them in it.

In Game 2, the tide turned in the Leafs’ favor. They dominated the possession game, registering 63 percent of the game’s even-strength shot attempts. The scoring chances were a reverse of Game 1, with the Bruins getting a few more in high-danger areas but the Leafs having more overall. The Bruins spending most of the game with a big lead contributed some to that, but even score-adjusted advanced stats liked the Leafs’ effort. But Andersen had given up three goals on the first five shots he saw and gotten yanked.

By some of those possession metrics, the Leafs were worse in victory than they’d been in defeat. The Bruins had a slight overall attempts edge and a couple more scoring chances, all leading to a 40-27 advantage in shots on goal. Boston was a little bit better at carrying the play, just like the Leafs had been in Game 2, but it didn’t matter. Hockey’s a weird sport, and on a night when your goalie makes saves like this one, you have a chance:

Toronto got some officiating help, too. The Leafs’ first goal came on a power play in the first period after the referees put the Bruins’ Riley Nash in the penalty box for delay of game — shooting the puck over the plexiglass from his own defensive end. The problem: Nash’s clearing attempt had hit the glass before going over it. He shouldn’t have been penalized, and James van Riemsdyk shouldn’t have gotten the chance to beat Rask with a comfortable poke-in from the left edge of the crease. But these are the breaks playoff winners need.

The Leafs made their own luck, too, with some great individual plays. Andersen’s preposterous save with his stick on a David Pastrnak shot from the bottom of the left circle was one. Another was Patrick Marleau’s insurance goal just before that, which involved the 38-year-old skating the puck a long way and then beating Rask under his left arm:

The margin between getting crushed and winning by two goals in the playoffs doesn’t have to be big. Toronto did some good in Game 3, and it did some bad, just like it had in the two before it. This series was never as ugly as the Bruins were making it look.

A win in Game 4 on Thursday would only go so far to solve their problems. They can’t win this series unless they win in Boston, and the worst thing that can happen to the Bruins after Thursday is a flight home with home-ice advantage for a best-of-three.

The Leafs have no reason to live in fear, though. They’ve won in Boston before (most recently a 4-1 decision in February), and a three-game series would be short enough that any long-term disadvantages they have might not show up.

Losing Game 4 would make all of this moot, because a comeback from 3-1 down against this Bruins team will never happen. But at least until Thursday, the Leafs are within arm’s reach of a team that was never beating it as badly as it looked. That’s a start.