Toronto Maple Leafs: William Nylander Primed for Huge Year

The Toronto Maple Leafs William Nylander is primed for a bounce-back season.

Perhaps the greatest of Toronto Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas many successes is never having traded William Nylander when his stock was down.

The fans were soured on him because he held out, the media jumped on him because they were lazy and bored, and the Leafs were faced with a terrible salary cap situation most people didn’t see a way out of.

But Dubas never wavered and eventually Nylander will make him look like a genius for it.

Toronto Maple Leafs and William Nylander

There is this weird phenomena that you see today where the public has a very bad, very easily disproven opinion that is nearly ubiquitous to the point where people holding the opposite (and correct) view start adopting it in order to not seem like they are biased.

A good example of this is William Nylander.  Even when you hear someone defend him, they usually start by acknowledging how bad he was last year.

Except he wasn’t bad.

He was good.

In 54 games, when William Nylander was on the ice, the Leafs got 56% of the shot-attempts (EXTREMELY GOOD), 54% of the shots, 57% of the scoring chances and 55% of the goals.

Those are superstar numbers.

But because the counting stats (i.e goals and assists) were down, the easy-narrative was to say that he played poorly.  In fact, he was fantastic, as the numbers clearly demonstrate.

Unfortunately, Nylander had a 7.69% on-ice shooting percentage, which is extremely low and down from 12% the year before. (All stats from naturalstattrick.com).

Nylander’s personal shooting-percentage was a ridiculous 5.31%, even though for the rest of his career it’s been 12% (54 game sample vs 185 games).

Clearly, the bad luck of a low shooting percentage sapped Nylander’s game of goals and assists, but if we look at the things that lead to goals and assists, Nylander’s  game was as good as it’s always been.

Nylander is among the NHL’s best scoring chance producers and play drivers. He completely dominated the World Cup and the most recent World Championships.  For his career, his 5v5 stats are as good Mitch Marner’s.

He’s going to play the majority of his time with a player who can score 65 goals if he stays healthy.

And, after a summer which saw ridiculous contracts handed out to the likes of Kevin Hayes, Anders Lee and Brock Nelson, William Nylander’s seven million dollar cap hit is already a team-friendly bargain.

Nylander’s season last year should tantalize you with the possibility of what he will do when the shooting-percentages start to go his way.  It is not impossible that he could win a scoring title while feeding Auston Matthews the puck.

He is absolutely primed for a huge season.