Toronto Maple Leafs Greatness Obscured by Improbable Tampa/Boston Runs

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a Stanley Cup Contender.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have one of the best rosters in the NHL.  Arguably the best one.

They also happen to be in third place in their division, four points back of home-ice advantage in round one of the playoffs.

And their fan base is extremely pessimistic.

The pessimism is unwarranted, but understandable.  After all, this is the Leafs were talking about and they haven’t accomplished anything in fifty years as  a franchise.

But much like the crappy Leafs teams of the past are obscuring their current greatness, so too are the preposterous records of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins.

Amazing Obscures the Pretty Good

The Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins are awesome teams. I want to preface what I’m about to say by saying that I am not making excuses for the Leafs, I am not trying to paint a rosy picture, and I’m even saying you should care or change your mind about how you feel about the team.

But maybe, if you want a little optimism about how and why they could go all the way, I’d like to try and provide that for you by telling you this:

Tampa and Boston aren’t that good.

Let’s consider a few things here:

– The NHL has a salary cap which causes parity. This means that there are no super teams, that results are based on a higher degree of luck, etc.  Basically more teams are closer to average and competitive, versus having a bunch of really good and really bad teams.

– Since the introduction of the salary cap, only four teams have had leads in the standings similar to Tampa’s current lead over second place Boston, and three of those teams are in the top ten of all time regular season teams, while the fourth is in the top 20.

– Tampa is on pace to be a top five team of all-time.  But if you compare their roster to Nashville, Toronto, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Boston or San Jose you don’t see a significantly better roster.

– In the NHL because of parity, whoever wins is often a coin flip.  Most games do not feature teams of significantly different abilities.  Neither Tampa or Boston are dominating any team based stats.  If Tampa was as good as their record indicated, you would suspect that they’d dominate in peripheral stats, but this isn’t the case. (Stats for this article from naturalstattrick.com).

Take all this information together, and combine it with this knowledge: The best NHL team of all-time, the 76-77 Montreal Canadiens, failed to win a quarter of their games.

So when a team like Tampa or Boston pads their record by going on some kind of insane ten or twenty game winning streak, you should know that those are so incredibly improbable that they are almost entirely luck based.

If a team went 8-2 every ten games, they’d be, by far, the best team of all time.  So given that the best team ever assembled couldn’t hope to maintain streaks like we’ve seen from Tampa and Boston recently, we should realize that they are just random runs of luck.

Tampa and Boston are great teams, but it is statistically unlikely that they are the best teams ever assembled, especially given what we know about the salary cap.  Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that they aren’t that much better than our beloved Toronto Maple Leafs.

Conclusion

Consider also that the Toronto Maple Leafs have the 19th highest shooting percentage in the NHL on the power-play, while Tampa and Boston are #1 and #2, respectively.  Consider also that every statistical expert I have ever asked about it agrees that shooting percentage is random and not something a player or players can control.

Yes, Matthews will always have a higher shooting percentage than Brown, but as a team, there is not enough difference in skill or tactics to explain how Tampa has double the shooting percentage than Toronto does.

Once you know all this, you can know rest assured that while Tampa and Boston are making it hard for people to realize how good the Toronto Maple Leafs are, they aren’t necessarily better teams.

Eventually the Leafs are due for their own run of luck, and perhaps it will coincide with playoff season.