Toronto Maple Leafs: Jake Gardiner vs Ron Hainsey (Cage Match)

The Toronto Maple Leafs are cruising along in the dog days of the season.

It’s nearly the end of February, and the trade deadline is Monday. After that, it’s a fight with Boston and Montreal for home ice advantage over the last twenty games. It’s going to be a great end to what has already been a pretty great season for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The Leafs are only a couple of days and a couple bad breaks away from being in second place in the NHL, and the team is likely to get even better in the next couple of days.

So I thought I’d take one last try at convincing people that Jake Gardiner is a good player.

When people talk about Gardiner, they inevitably talk about give aways. The fact is, Gardiner doesn’t give the puck away more than anyone else does. He got a reputation for giving the puck away, mostly because he was a high risk high reward defenseman on a bad team. Now everyone is looking for and remembering when he makes any little mistake.

It’s confirmation bias, and every single human on earth is susceptible to it. So it’s understandable that people think this way, but he is such a good player that his reputation doesn’t even make sense.

Last year he was one of only 16 NHL defenseman to get 50 points, and out of those 16 Gardiner was in the top half when it comes to defensive metrics.

In his career as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs, playing at 5v5 Jake Gardiner is a career 53% possession player, who has a positive 38 goal differential, and a positive 189 scoring chance differential. (stats from naturalstattrick.com and 5v5 unless noted).

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Gardiner has 44 goals and 243 points in 547 career games, in total. For parts of eight seasons, some of which the Leafs were awful and one in which they were the worst team in the league, Jake Gardiner has been on the ice for more goals, scoring chances and shot-attempts than he has allowed.

If he was a bad player, as is reputed, how would he accomplish this? This isn’t some esoteric stats either – it’s just goals, scoring chances and shot-attempts. If you keep those things going in a positive direction you are a good player, end of story.

Gardiner vs Hainsey

Just for fun, let’s compare Gardiner with Ron Hainsey because I often write about how the Leafs need to improve their roster by removing Hainsey, and inevitably people tell me I am wrong and that Gardiner is the one who should go.

This season, in two less games, the coach has played Gardiner 100 more minutes.

Gadiner has a 51.38 CF% Hainsey has 48.10% CF (possession rating).

Gardiner leads with 62% of the goals scored while he is on the ice vs Hainsey’s 57%

Scoring chances are 54% to 49% for Gardiner .

On a per hour rate, Hainsey allows 36 shots against per 60 while Gardiner allows 32. That’s a four shot difference.

Gardiner has 18 points while Hainsey has 11. Gardiner also has double the first assists than Hainsey does.

The faceoff starts, shooting and save percentages are roughly equal. Their two lines have almost evenly split the hard minutes this year. There PDOs are even the same, so we have a very good basis of comparison here. Probably the closest one you could ever hope to get comparing two players, actually.

The only real difference is that Hainsey has a much better partner in Morgan Rielly than Gardiner has had in Nikita Zaitsev. So all other things being equal, Hainsey had a significant advantage.

Jake Gardiner is a great hockey player. I don’t think he’s a top-ten NHL defenseman, he’s not on par with players like Rielly, Carlson, Hedman, Letang, Jones, Hamilton, Doughty, Burns or Karlsson. Those players score so much that their offense overcomes any other deficiencies they may have.

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But Gardiner is right at home in the next tier of defenseman. He’s a top pairing defenseman, and he has excellent defensive metrics. He isn’t a special teams threat, so his rating drops some, but he is among the best 5v5 defenseman in the NHL. That’s something special.

I maintain that he is among the best Leafs defenseman of all time and I urge you to reconsider your views on him if they are not making you feel all warm and fuzzy.

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