The Maple Leafs goalie for Game 5 is probably going to be Joseph Woll.
The Maple Leafs goalie for Game 5 might still be Ilya Samsonov.
The Maple Leafs goalie for Game 5 definitely won’t be Ian Scott.
It could have been Jeremy Swayman.
That last one stings long-suffering Leafs fans. Their killer in this current playoff series could have been their savior.
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If there’s a Bambino-like curse on the forever-snakebitten Leafs, it’s that the goalies, who could have been Stanley Cup-winning franchise icons for them, one way or another have ended up playing for the Bruins instead. The Stanley Cup lives a few blocks away from Scotiabank Arena at the Hockey Hall of Fame, but it’s been 57 years since the local team hoisted it. Boston has won three Stanley Cups during the 57 years Toronto has gone without a championship. On all three of those rosters was a goalie who could have been a Leaf.
It starts with Gerry Cheevers. His famous stitches mask could have been part of Toronto lore. The Leafs initially held his territorial rights and he played two games for them in 1962. But they left him exposed in the intra-league draft in 1965. The Bruins selected him and he helped lead Boston to two Stanley Cups as well as beating the Leafs in four games in the quarterfinals in 1969.
Tuukka Rask should have been a Maple Leaf, too. Toronto picked him in the first round (21 overall) of the 2005 draft. No goalie ever drafted by the Leafs has ever won more games. But all 308 of those wins came for the Bruins. While he was still playing in Finland, Toronto dealt him to Boston for former Bruins Rookie of the Year Andrew Raycroft, who lasted just two seasons in Ontario and never started a playoff game there.
Rask went to two All-Star games, won a Vezina Trophy and was the starting goalie in two seasons when the Bruins advanced to the Stanley Cup Final. And just to rub it in, he beat Toronto in the playoffs three times.
This series would look awfully different if Swayman was in the Maple Leaf goal. It could have happened. In fact, Swayman thought it would. He told the Dropping the Gloves podcast he thought Toronto was going to pick him at 110 overall in the fourth round of the 2017 draft.
“I was looking for Toronto to draft me because I talked to them a ton during the year,” he said. “Pick 110 came around and Toronto was up. …They drafted another goalie.”
That goalie was Ian Scott. Scouting goalies is an inexact science, but Scott goes down as a huge whiff for Toronto. Hampered by injuries, he never reached the NHL. He played just two games in the American Hockey League and just six in the ECHL and retired in 2022.
One pick later, the Bruins picked Swayman. He’s looked like a future No. 1 ever since. He thrived at the University of Maine, then for the Providence Bruins and now in Boston, where he was an All-Star this season.
And like Rask, Swayman is torturing the Maple Leafs. He was brilliant in Game 1, strong in Game 3 and brilliant again in Game 4 as Boston built a 3-1 series lead. While Ilya Samsonov has played to his erratic inconsistent reputation, Swayman has been the best player in the series.
There’s no way to know if Toronto could have won a Stanley Cup with Cheevers, but the native of nearby St. Catherines, Ontario would likely have been a crowd favorite.
Toronto clearly would have been better with Rask. During the time that Rask played in Boston — from 2007-08 to 2021-22 — Toronto didn’t win a single playoff series against anyone, while Rask himself beat them three times. A hefty percentage of Boston fans didn’t think Rask did enough over his career, but in Toronto they’d have built him a statue outside Scotiabank Arena.
Swayman is still too new to form lasting judgments about what his career is going to be. But he’s been terrific to this point and he’s certainly better than Ian Scott or anyone the Leafs have trotted out since.
Follow MassLive sports columnist Matt Vautour on Twitter at @MattVautour424.
