There is no such thing as “deserve” in hockey. This is the thing about a sport that’s random, that has big fluctuations in the performance of most goalies and is about failure not success. Most shots aren’t goals, and the margin for that is so big, that just the ordinary way the world works means a team can fail to score and an opposing goalie can make a seemingly huge amount of saves at just the wrong time and the wrong team wins.
I don’t think the Leafs are bad, and if you’re one of those people who like to imagine that a team that has been near the top of the league for years is somehow specially terrible in a unique way that other teams don’t experience and the standings and other metrics are wrong just in this one case, well — that’s a conspiracy theory.