TORONTO – Anthony Stolarz has had enough.
The Maple Leafs goaltender cut a frustrated figure Saturday following a 4-3 overtime loss to the Seattle Kraken in a physical matchup where he twice found himself flat on his back following contact.
Stolarz was thumped to the ice on two separate occasions — bruising forward Mason Marchment did the most damage — and then watched Josh Mahura move in on a breakaway and score his first goal in 134 games in the extra period after Toronto winger William Nylander lost his man in coverage.
The hulking netminder was asked post-game if the lack of cohesion has anything to do with early-season rust.
A fuming Stolarz was having none of it.
“A lot of guys have been here for a while,” he fired back. “Overtime, you can’t let someone beat you up the ice there and get a clearcut breakaway. You want to be on the ice in that situation, you’ve gotta work hard, gotta work back. It cost us a point.
“When we work hard, the results come.”
Stolarz, who smashed his stick after Mahura’s winner, said Toronto needs to stiffen up in front of its own net — and make life more difficult for his opposite 200 feet away.
“We just didn’t play our game,” he said. “They outworked us in front on the net. They blocked shots, they beat us up and down the ice. And the score was indicative of that. They just outworked us — plain simple.”
“We’ve got to start going into the cage a little harder, make it harder for their goalies,” Stolarz added. “It’s not fun. I don’t like having 225-pound guys landing on me. Hopefully learned a lesson.”
Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly said that intensity is something the team values.
“You want guys who care,” he said. “You want guys who are motivated and who want to win, and he is that. He brings a lot of personality and a lot of energy to our group, and that’s extremely valuable.”
Toronto blueliner Brandon Carlo, who knocked Jaden Schwartz into Stolarz on Seattle’s 3-2 goal in the second, said the club must do a better job in the game’s dirty areas.
“Getting into the interior and pressure their goalie,” Carlo said. “The same way that they do ours.”
Leafs head coach Craig Berube, who watched Marchment run Stolarz over on a sequence that saw the incandescent goalie angrily shove the net out of the way to get at his opponent before a scrum ensued, hasn’t been happy with his team’s overall response in similar situations.
“Not good enough,” said Berube, a Stanley Cup-winning bench boss. “That play there … that happens at times, but in general, we’re not clearing out the crease enough. We’re not doing a good enough job.
“We have to protect our goalie. We’ve got to be harder around our net. I’m not preaching go and take guys’ heads off, but enough’s enough.”
Rielly said it’s a fine line when a team’s puck-stopper gets knocked around.
“There’s a time where you gotta do what you gotta do, and the line is out of sight,” he said. “And then there’s a time where you might need a goal and you need to go on the power play and wait for later.”
The Leafs sit 3-2-1 early in a campaign that has already seen them play six home dates, but there are some worrying signs with on-ice details, including how Saturday’s OT session unravelled.
“We didn’t do what we should have done,” Berube said. “We want to be in more of a wedge so we don’t get beat by speed like that. We’re too spread out, we’re all man-on-man. It’s a difficult play for Willy, but he’s got to have that guy if he wants to man-up like that.
“And the guy skated by him.”
Despite it only being Toronto’s seventh game on the schedule, Stolarz sounded the alarm in a locker room that has enjoyed plenty of regular-season success — and very little of it in the playoffs.
“How many time points are we gonna leave out there?” he asked rhetorically. “We have the skill, we have the grit, we have the grind. It’s just frustrating that we just can’t put together right now.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2025.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
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