Toronto Maple Leafs Best D Pairing Gets No Press

Quick: Which Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman lead the team in possession last year?

Morgan Rielly? Jake Gardiner? Nope…….it was Connor Carrick. His 5v5 (even-strength is all we really care about here) 52.8 CF% was tops on the Toronto Maple Leafs D. Now, some are skeptical about these kinds of stats and others don’t even know what they are, so let me give a quick primer.

Corsi-For Percentage is simply a differential stat that tracks shot-attempts. The team that takes the most shot-attempts clearly has the puck the most, so shot-attempts are used as a proxy for possession.

By looking at a players Corsi, or possession rating, we can get information we can’t get from looking at goals, or even shots. At the NHL level, goals are a “result” and they are almost random. A player can play amazing and be stoned constantly by a hot goalie. Another player can have a terrible game, but both shots he takes go in the net.

By using a large sample size (there can be 150 combined shot-attempts in a game with only five goals) you eliminate these kinds of flukes from influencing your analysis. Over an entire season, possession correlates very closely with winning. Now, Corsi isn’t perfect, and there are contextual things that should also be considered (who are you playing against, what situations are you playing in), but if a coach is deploying a player in a way in which that player is producing above a 50% shot-attempt differential (Corsi) then that player is being effective.

While Corsi gets some flack, it should be noted that no single number is a definitive representation of a player’s play. When evaluating players, you need to use many stats and as much context as you can.

Back to Carrick

Just because Carrick was the Leafs best possession defenseman, doesn’t mean he was their best D. But it does mean that he was extremely effective. Given the range of Corsi (40% is enforcer-level, anything over 50% is good, and 55% is approaching elite) 52% is quite good.

He’s also right-handed, which makes him even more valuable, but I digress.

Carrick did not play the toughest minutes on the team, but he was always helping the Leafs win when he was on the ice. The Leafs have added Hainsey, and now everyone is assuming Carrick will be outside the top four, but I believe this is premature.

Here are the Leafs most common pairings last year:

"Gardiner and Carrick: 677 minutes together, 54.31% CF Gardiner and Zaitsev 314 minutes together, 48.01% CF Hunwick and Polak 712 minutes together, 48.65% CFZaitsev and Rielly 810 minutes together, 49.39% CFZaitsev and Gardiner 314 minutes together, 48.01% CF"

The Toronto Maple Leafs Best Pairing

As you can see, the by far most effective pairing was Gardiner and Carrick. When you consider the limited range of what a CF% can be (40 to 60%) you can see that they DESTROY the competition among other pairings, being on average six percentage points better. There is a LOT of debate about how much quality of competition effects these things (the math says the bigger the amount of minutes, the less it matters) and Zaisev and Rielly did play the toughest minutes.

Given what we know about the effects of quality of competition, playing slightly harder minutes does not account for a five percentage point, or nearly nearly 20% better possession rating. Gardiner and Carrick were simply the best pairing the Leaf had last year and that is an empirical fact.

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I am not saying that Gardiner and Hunwick should play the toughest minutes. But I do think they should be kept together and deployed the way they were last year. By controlling 54% of the shots for about 1/3 of the game, the pairing gives the Toronto Maple Leafs an excellent chance to win every game.

This is made even more important by the fact that the Leafs have been such a bad defensive team. It blows my mind that they would want to use a player as bad as Ron Hainsey is defensively to warp all their pairings. If we are to believe Babcock’s summer ramblings, then he plans on using Gardiner with Zaitsev, which is a huge drop-off to what Carrick and Gardiner do together.

Connor Carrick: Top-Four Defenseman

In my opinion, if the Leafs wanted to optimize their defense and make up for their lack of a legit #1 elite defenseman, they should play Zaitsev, Rielly and Gardiner all on different pairings. Put Gardiner with Carrick and have at least one line you know is great, then mix and match with whoever end up making the other three defenseman on the roster until you get success.

Connor Carrick is just 23. He plays back to let Gardiner play his high-risk game, and this cuts into his point totals. But he is a very good defensive player, by virtue of his ability to keep the puck moving in the right direction.

Jake Gardiner is the Leafs best defenseman, and both he and Carrick did worse when they were separated than they did together. For a team with a lot of question marks on the blue-line, and with their overall defensive game, the Leafs (or at least their fans, who knows what the management actually thinks?) seem to be in a huge hurry to move on from a 23 year old defenseman who empirically improves the team’s main weakness (i.e defense).

Next: Nylander Contract Extension Status

Connor Carrick should be on the Toronto Maple Leafs, and deployed with Jake Gardiner as their co-top pairing.

stats from naturalstattrick.com

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