The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday.
Everyone was at ease. The Toronto Maple Leafs could beat good teams. Maybe, just maybe, the team’s management could avoid following the advice of hockey washouts who, when the game passed them by, took jobs riling up idiots on TV.
Then they lost to Florida and I woke up to a bunch of people saying ‘I told you so.’
With the aforementioned blowhards riling up their base like a xenophobic politician at a truckstop, it seems impossible to get a word in edgewise that isn’t tinged with panic, insanity, short-sightedness and a desire to tell people exactly what they want to hear. (Which seems to be appealing to their tendancy that everything is a disaster and what’s happening right now will never, ever, ever, change).
So, my apologies in advance, but this is going to be pretty tame. It’s going to feature reason, thinking and the conclusions won’t be insane.
Most of all, it’s going to make the point that you shouldn’t just assume that what is going on right now will never go back to normal. It will.
Here goes.
The Truth as Regarding the Toronto Maple Leafs
It’s a long season and weird things happen. Though unlikely, a good player can go a long time without scoring a goal or even a point.
This might seem crazy, but its a foundation concept of critical thinking: results vary. You get better predictions about the future from focusing on process.
Although no one will say this on TV for fear of coming across as sensible, the season is long and it’s important to look at it in a big-picture sense. The most important thing is to remember that anomalies occur.
When evaluating hockey players, you should keep in mind the rules of coin flipping: if you flip a coin enough times, you will always get to 50% of heads and 50% of tails. But, on your way to flipping enough coins for this to happen, you might encounter some pretty weird stuff.
If you are willing to take arbitrary end-points on your way to 1000 flips, you could find a time where heads won 20-5. Then if you were a hockey reporter on TV you would say “between 4:44 and 4:56, heads came out twenty times while tails just five. What is wrong with Tails? I think it’s the compete level.”
And millions of people would take you seriously.
That’s what happens in hockey every day.
Stop Screaming, Breathe, Take Stock
Auston Matthews has one goal in 12 games.
Nazem Kadri has one goal in 12 games.
During this time, Kadri is getting 63% of the scoring chances when he’s on the ice, and Matthews is getting 53%. Both are representative of good play. It shows that when they’re on the ice, the Leafs are carrying play.
For all intents and purposes, William Nylander has spent 100% of his ice time over these 12 games playing with one of either Kadri or Matthews.
Blaming Nylander for their lack of scoring is post-hoc nonsense. It’s textbook logical fallacy whereby a person finds a random correlation and declares it to be the cause.
But consider this- given the past records of both Kadri and Matthews, you could put them with Gauthier and Lindholm (two players who are essentially offensive black holes) and it is highly probable that they would score more. So probable that you don’t just expect it, you could guarantee it.
I don’t care who the wingers are, it is a certainty that both Kadri and Matthews will score more than one goal every 12 games.
So blaming Nylander is objectively wrong.
Consider this: if each player had their normal scoring pace for 12 games, then Nylander would have several assists, we’d have written off his slump to sitting out training camp and everything would be fine.
Instead, we are faced with absolute non-sense about how Nylander sucks, how he has no compete level, how he is going to get traded etc. etc.
I mean, the NHL Network did a 2015 re-draft and picked Kasperi Kapanen ahead of Nylander, which is idiotic. I love Kasperi Kapanen, but let’s not let recency bias make complete fools out of ourselves.
Just this week we celebrated how Mitch Marner became the first member of the Toronto Maple Leafs to score 60 points in his first three years.
Well guess what? Had he not missed training camp and then gone on a terrifically unlucky streak, William Nylander would have done the same thing.
Scoring 60 points in each of your first two seasons puts you on a path to superstardom.
That’s is 162 games and only a person with no ability to see anything but the present would put a 12 game sample on an even footing with a 162 game sample.
William Nylander is the exact same player he was last year.
He will return to being the player who only missed being in the top ten 5v5 scoring by two or three points. He will continue to be a dominant transition player, and a player who’s incredible skills compensate for his complete lack of bodychecking.
My god.
Yes, Nylander needs to finish. But lets keep in mind that weird things happen. Nino Niederreiter was traded this week, and he once went 50 games with an on-ice shooting percentage of under 2%. Wacky things happen in the NHL.
There is probably a one in a million chance that Matthews and Kadri would each go the same 12 games with each only getting one goal, and that this would coincide with William Nylander’s cold streak.
They can both finish their careers in Toronto and it’s not likely to ever happen again.
Nylander is on a cold streak where he’s putting up a 53% possession rating, looking like his old elite self as he transitions the puck through the neutral zone (a skill which he might be the best in the NHL at doing) and getting a ton of chances.
A person paid to know better said on TV he should be a healthy scratch. I thought that kind of discourse was saved for internet comments sections.
Nylander Will be Fine
William Nylander has an on-ice shooting percentage of 5.3% which is ridiculous. That isn’t his personal shooting percentage, it’s the shooting percentage of every player he’s been on the ice with this season.
At the very minimum, even if playing badly, it should be around 9/10%, so that gives you an idea of how unlucky he’s been.
Yes, I get that people want to see results.
The ability to make good decisions rest completely on a person’s ability to but aside results and look at underlying causes. There’s even a folksy cliché about it – See the Forest for the Trees (remember that one?).
But we are in a cycle where the player is slumping, the talking heads are riling up the fans, and the fans are foaming at the mouth.
I think we should all remember that last season Mitch Marner went 33 games with one goal. Babcock put him on the fourth line. He wasn’t necessarily playing badly either.
In the big picture, William Nylander is a first line winger who is 22 years old. If you’re not happy he’s on this team, you should find a new team to cheer for.
I’m sitting here looking at the big picture, and honestly it feels like I live in an alternate reality. I know there are other people out there who feel this way, but it’s hard to find them when only the loudest people say the craziest things.
stats from naturalstattrick.com