SIMMONS: Sheldon Keefe Is Running Out Of Time As Coach Of The Puzzlingly Listless Maple Leafs

Sheldon Keefe is running out of time as coach of the Maple Leafs.

But the truth is, maybe no one could take these overpaid and playoff underproductive Leafs players and make them into a post-season team of consequence. They just don’t rise to the occasion. They don’t turn home ice into any kind of advantage. Too often, they lack desperation, they lack urgency, sometimes, probably too often in this playoff series, they seem to lack emotion.

And where does that come from? From the players? From the preparation? From the game plan? From the organization? From a combination of all four?

Whatever it is, however it is, this isn’t new for the Leafs with Keefe as coach. Or before Keefe was coach. It’s a story, sad but true, a Maple Leafs story that won’t go away, can’t go away, until they re-write it themselves.

And that doesn’t seem very possible now with Toronto trailing 3-1 in the best-of-seven series against the Boston Bruins, with its season looking like it will end Tuesday night at the TD Garden. It will likely end with the Leafs playing too much of the series lacking fire, lacking intensity, lacking the special ingredients that make for playoff success, looking too flat too often, playing afraid to lose instead of playing to win, and that’s never been a successful ticket at Stanley Cup time.

There is a feeling in almost every home playoff game in almost every NHL arena. A buzz to the night. An excitement with anticipation awaiting. The crowd makes the players faster, braver, more physical, more energized. Getting through the first minutes of any playoff game on the road — at the start of the first period, at the start of the second period — should be natural for the Leafs. But they began Saturday night playing cautiously and lacking fire. This wasn’t about a crowd not being loud enough. This was about a team being too silent to engage a crowd hoping to play along.

It was so still, so quiet in the first period of Game 4 for the Leafs. The same was true as the second period began. It was only after trailing 3-0 to start the third, with Auston Matthews in the dressing room for the night, his absence unexplained, with Joseph Woll in goal instead of Ilya Samsonov, that they showed any kind of life. But that took two periods. At home?

“I didn’t think we came out flat,” said Morgan Rielly, who should be sentenced to re-watching the game on Sunday. “Our season is on the line,” he said.

He said it’s on the line. That’s the kind of of thing you say when the cameras and notebooks are in front of you. You say what you think others will want to hear. The words mean nothing, though. Actions mean something. And there wasn’t enough action Saturday night.

They had two shots on goal and nothing resembling a scoring chance in the first 10 minutes. The second period started the way the first one began. Whatever was happening in the building, the hope, the circumstance, the fact that best players on the Bruins were outplaying the best players on the Leafs, it wasn’t good enough. Not even close enough to being good enough.

What did the Leafs do better than the Bruins in Game 4? Answer: Nothing.

Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak were huge for Boston. Matthews didn’t play in the third period, but didn’t do much before that. Captain John Tavares is being outscored in the series 8-1 by captain Marchand. Mitch Marner came alive in the third period — way too late to come back. William Nylander looked like someone who had been out for more than a week. His hands and his feet didn’t always seem in sync and having Keefe anchor him on a line with Pontus Holmberg and Calle Jarnkrok is a lot like asking Fred Astaire to dance with Wilma Flintsone.

So what now in this eighth season of Matthews, Marner and Nylander? What now in this fifth season of Keefe? What now for a team that comes up short each and every April and May, with a first-year general manager and a team president in his 10th season?

The Leafs were shouting at each other on the bench, which means they must care, they just have a strange way of showing it. What was wrong?

“It’s hard to say,” said Keefe, “hard to pinpoint … We looked a little tight.”

And then he said: “Don’t question our effort.”

He said it with a straight face. He said it in all honesty. He said it as another season is on brink of ending early and he has to be wondering if this season is his last.