It’s that time of year when NHL teams are gearing up for the postseason, and suspicions of positioning manipulations start to emerge. The Toronto Maple Leafs still have an Atlantic Division crown and home-ice advantage to lock up over the season’s final four games, but people are already talking about who they will be staring down at the opposite side of the ice for Game 1 of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs.
There are statistical possibilities that Toronto will face a handful of Eastern Conference foes in the opening round, but barring any unlikely goings-on in the final week of the regular season, the Maple Leafs will face either the Florida Panthers or Ottawa Senators.
Not long ago, it was easy to pick the more favourable opponent. Few would want anything to do with the defending Stanley Cup champion Panthers, particularly when the other option is an Ottawa squad that hasn’t reached the postseason since 2016-17. Now, however, the choice isn’t quite as obvious. The young Senators have surged to clinch a playoff spot and are playing like they have nothing to lose. Florida, meanwhile, is banged up and looks tired as they come off two consecutive trips to the Stanley Cup Final.
So, who is the preferred first-round opponent for the Maple Leafs? Here are the reasons why a match-up with each of the Panthers and Senators may be preferable and why they might not be.
Why the Maple Leafs Want to Face Florida
Any Maple Leafs fan looking for a hopeful, encouraging blueprint on how to topple Florida would be wise to look to the 2023 Tampa Bay Lightning, the victims of Toronto’s only playoff series win during the nine-year stretch of the Auston Matthews era. The Lightning were pretty well spent coming off of three straight trips to the Cup Final, and that proved to be their undoing despite icing much of the same talented roster that won them back-to-back Cups.
The defending champions and preseason division favourites have looked worn down at times and now face health questions regarding some of their most important players. In what has been a brutal stretch of bad injury luck, Sam Bennett will miss the rest of the regular season with an upper-boy injury, Matthew Tkachuk (lower-body injury) is also unlikely to see any more regular season action, and Aaron Ekblad (PED suspension) is ineligible to return until Game 3 of the first round. Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart and Gustav Forsling have just returned from the sidelines, while Dmitry Kulikov and Nico Sturm should be back in the lineup imminently.
Even if the Panthers are gradually getting healthy, who’s to say that the many key returning players will be at 100% once the NHL’s second season gets underway? Just look at trade deadline acquisition Brad Marchand, who was sidelined over the first three weeks after being traded to Florida and has struggled to adapt to his new surroundings over his first seven games in the Sunshine State. This could be Toronto’s time to strike.
Why the Maple Leafs Want to Avoid Florida
Then again, what if the Panthers have a rested, Cup-caliber roster just as the playoffs get underway? Imagine if the Maple Leafs do all this work to win their first division title in a quarter century, only to wind up mismatched against the same physical, punishing team that dominated them two seasons ago and won it all last spring. This version would also have defensive lynchpin Seth Jones and Toronto’s enemy No. 1, Marchand, along for the ride.
In their two recent match-ups, six days apart, the Maple Leafs and Panthers have looked fairly evenly matched, each picking up a tight win on home ice. However, Florida was severely undermanned in both contests and had won their two previous meetings earlier this season. What hasn’t changed is that Toronto still has a tough time solving goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky and struggles to respond to what is one of the toughest forechecking teams in hockey.
It would be a very Paul Maurice thing to do to allow a vulnerability narrative to take hold regarding the Panthers, only to flip the script entirely once the postseason begins. That was, after all, exactly what happened when Florida was mired in a 3-7-2 skid late last season before winning their last four regular-season games to set the tone for their remarkable playoff run. Perhaps this is a case of them playing possum once again.
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Why the Maple Leafs Want to Face Ottawa
The Maple Leafs’ postseason troubles have a “Groundhog Day” feel to them, and not just because they mostly end with a first-round defeat but also because there’s been a growing sense that regular season success has only yielded inevitably daunting first-round challenges against the Panthers, Lightning and Boston Bruins. A showdown with the Senators would – if nothing else – bring some welcome variety.
WE MAY GET A BATTLE OF ONTARIO IN THE FIRST ROUND. 💥🇨🇦 https://t.co/iIgntHBZBN pic.twitter.com/bkb1N3kbJ0
— theScore (@theScore) April 9, 2025
Of course, there’s more to it than that. Ottawa has no playoff pedigree. Longstanding Senators Brady Tkachuk and Thomas Chabot will be making their NHL postseason debuts. That inexperience stands in stark contrast to the Panthers, not to mention the Maple Leafs as well. If there’s any playoff history to draw on here, it’s the dominance of Toronto during the Battle of Ontario years in the early 2000s.
History aside, the Maple Leafs would stand as the clear favourites in a series between the teams. Not only does Toronto have postseason experience on their side, but they have also accumulated 10 more points and boast a goal differential of plus-28, compared to Ottawa’s plus-4. Having home ice would certainly be an advantage, but Maple Leafs fans have also been known to find their way into the Canadian Tire Centre for big games. Toss in what is probably, for now anyway, a less talented roster and lingering questions over Tkachuk’s upper-body injury, and the argument for playing the Senators is clear.
Why the Maple Leafs Want to Avoid Ottawa
I covered this very topic at the start of April, and much of it remains relevant. In short, a first-round series against Ottawa could set up a nightmare scenario for Toronto. Pitting the veteran, playoff-seasoned Maple Leafs against their plucky, upstart provincial contemporaries would make for a classic potential underdog story, one that would surely represent the biggest embarrassment in a long line of playoff disappointments for the franchise.
It isn’t an exaggeration to suggest that losing to the Senators could uproot the franchise. With Ottawa and the Montreal Canadiens on the rise and the Panthers and Lightning still standing as bona fide contenders, a loss to the Senators would not only result in regional humiliation but would drop them further down the pecking order in the Atlantic. Furthermore, it would make the prospect of being capped out to retain the current core by re-signing Mitch Marner and John Tavares this summer highly questionable.
Don’t look now, but this doomsday scenario isn’t all that far-fetched. Ottawa has a blend of speed and skill that could give the Maple Leafs fits. They also boast Linus Ullmark and Anton Forsberg, two goaltenders who have typically fared well against Toronto. This season, for example, they have mustered just three goals in as many games against the Senators, losing all three and being shut out once. With the Senators being the breakthrough team on the scene, all the pressure would be on the Maple Leafs’ shoulders.
The nature of the parity of the NHL playoffs is that all the remaining teams are good, so there’s no such thing as a desirable match-up. That’s only too true for the Maple Leafs, who are good enough to beat anyone but have enough postseason baggage to fall in any series. I would lean slightly towards a first-round clash with Ottawa to avoid the prospect of running into a Panthers squad that’s back at full strength, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be anxious heading into a series with the Senators.
