The Toronto Maple Leafs were at home Wednesday night, presumably, watching the St. Louis Blues win the Stanley Cup.
If you’re a contending team, which the Toronto Maple Leafs are, it’s only natural to compare yourself to the Champs. A lot of people have been coming up to me and saying “hey, the Blues have this, so the Leafs should have it to.”
I’ve had several people say interesting things to me. Things such as:
“The Leafs need a player like Bouwmeester.”
“The Leafs should never have gotten rid of Bozak.”
And that the Blues winning proves __x____.
The thing is though, it proves nothing.
Leafs Can’t Learn From Blues
The NHL has a salary cap that ensures near even talent distribution, and prevents (mostly) stacked teams. As should be obvious, the more parity there is, the more random the results become.
This isn’t to say the Blues winning was a total fluke – it wasn’t. They built a very good roster, and they played well. Their being in last place as late as January is probably as unlucky, if not more, than their improbable win was.
But in the NHL, the Blues aren’t an all-time great team. They are not better than five to ten other current teams in any significant way (Leafs, Bruins, Lightning, Flames, Jets, Predators, Sharks, Penguins etc.)
It’s just a fact of life in today’s NHL that most of the time, the top five or ten teams will be pretty much even, more or less. WHo wins depends a lot on who gets hot, how long it lasts for, who gets a higher shooting percentage etc.
This takes nothing away from the Blues, who won when it counted. It just means that taking lessons from them because they happened to win would be foolish.
For instance, the Lightning were much better, for way longer. They didn’t win a Cup (yet) but if you were going to copy someone’s style, you’d be smarter to copy Tampa rather than St. Louis.
My point is that winning doesn’t automatically make you the best, and if you’re not the best, other teams shouldn’t be copying you. Ergo, just because the Blues won by doing X, doesn’t mean the Leafs should.
For example, Jason Bouwmeester is as bad or worse than Ron Hainsey, who is pretty damn bad. Bouwmeester’s goalie had a .940 save percentage when he was on the ice in the playoffs this year. That’s not just insane, it’s practically unheard of.
So no, the Toronto Maple Leafs don’t need their own Bouwmeester (who is sub-Ozhiganov) and the fact that he happens to play for the Blues means nothing.
Don’t forget, in the NHL it’s the elite players who move the needle. Goalies and about ten percent of position players make over 90% of the difference. We complain about Ron Hainsey, but in reality, as long as he’s not on the top pairing, it really doesn’t matter too much who plays on the third pairing.
If you need further explanation about how lucky the Blues got, check this out:
Even Series, Lots of Luck
The Bruins and Blues each had a 50% possession rating in the Final series. Expected 5v5 goals were less than one goal apart. The Bruins scored six 5v4 PP goals to the Blues one. (Stats from naturalstattrick.com).
So basically, we have two teams that played seven games more or less evenly, and the biggest difference between them is that the Bruins scored five more PP goals in seven games. This doesn’t invalidate the Blues win, but it does suggest that they got pretty lucky.
I mean, all things being equal, the team with the most power-play goals almost always wins.
Furthermore, their rookie goalie, a third round pick from 2011, who is 25, went 25-5-1 with a 1.93 GAA and a .927 S%. Those numbers are crazy, but it’s the NHL and we know that goalies are unpredictable. The Hamburgler, Jim Carey, Andrew Raycroft…..anyone capable of making the NHL can go on a bender. This year, it just so happened to be Binnington and the Blues.
Jordan Binnington stand a very, very low chance of ever being considered a better goalie than Freddie Andersen. The Blues have players who wouldn’t even make the Leafs roster ( Bouwmeester, Steen, Bozak, Bertuzo, Fabbri and more).
In fact, it is the objective truth that the Toronto Maple Leafs have a superior roster to the Blues. There is nothing about St. Louis roster construction, style of play, or philosophy the Leafs should or will want to copy.
The Blues might have won the Cup, but the Leafs had much better odds to do so.