Mistakes continuing to cost slumping Maple Leafs

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The Maple Leafs had worked hard to get back on level terms.

Down 3-1 late in the second period Tuesday night, Easton Cowan snuck a shot through Avalanche goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood as a power play expired to cut the deficit in half.

Jack Roslovic then tied the game early in the third on a terrific individual effort.

Toronto was back trailing less than a minute later, undone once again by a series of egregious mistakes at an inopportune time, when Colorado captain Gabriel Landeskog was left unmarked to bury his second goal of the game in what would end in a 6-3 victory for the visitors.

“We made multiple poor decisions — multiple — and it’s usually how hockey works,” said Maple Leafs head coach Jim Hiller, whose club has lost four straight in regulation and six of seven overall. “Sometimes you make a bad decision and hopefully somebody cleans it up. You can’t make one, two, three poor decisions in a row … and veteran players, you can’t have it.

“You just can’t have it, and that’s how you lose. It’s just plain and simple.”

Raddysh tried to get off the ice before the winner, but was stuck out for a 75-second shift before eventually losing Landeskog in front, while Toronto winger William Nylander was slow to react to his wide-open opponent.

“You’re gonna take your chances and try to make hockey plays,” said Raddysh, who scored his first goal for the Maple Leafs in the opening period. “I’d like to have that change back. I was just trying to make a read. I thought I could get off, but ultimately ends up in the back of the net.

It was also a sequence of events Hiller, in his first season as Maple Leafs bench boss, as seen far too often for an injury-hit squad that sits 8-10-2 — good for second-last in the Atlantic Division through 20 games — after missing the playoffs for the first time in a decade last spring.

“Our results suck,” said Hiller, who was a Toronto assistant from 2015 through 2019. “You can write those stories, there’s no question, and we deserve that.

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