The Toronto Maple Leafs spent the summer stacking up on high-value, low cap hit forwards for the bottom of their lineup.
The Toronto Maple Leafs signed old rival Jason Spezza, they brought in a Russian ringer in Ilya Mikheyev, as well as scooping up every half-way-decent player available who was looking to earn a spot at the bottom of an NHL lineup.
The interesting thing about the Leafs acquisitions – besides just how many there were – is that they have targeted a specific kind of player. That is highly skilled players who are not going to get top-six NHL minutes, and as such don’t have a traditional role to play in an NHL lineup.
Things are changing, but there is still a tendency for teams throughout the league to fill out their lineup with high-energy checkers who will “grind” and “play the game the right way.”
Training Camp Battle
The Leafs have decided to ice four lines of skill, and they’ve acquired the players to pull it off. Though they haven’t scored enough, or been given enough prime ice time to prove their worth and earn a top six job, players like Pontus Aberg, Nick Shore and Garrett Wilson all have underlying analytics that suggest they are better than your average replacement player – i.e your typical fourth liner.
The beauty of this strategy by the Leafs is that if they are right, they stand to gain an edge over virtually every team in the league for over a third of each game (roughly how much lines 3 and 4 will play).
But if they are wrong, it probably won’t have any effect.
If you measure the overall impact of players in the NHL, the elite players have massive impacts compared to non-elite players. The interesting thing, however, is that the difference between the non-elite players is so small, that as long as your team’s elite players were in line with the rest of the league, it would barely make a difference if you had the worst bottom-six in the league or the best.
The Leafs are hoping to change that by deploying a highly skilled bottom of the lineup that will hopefully have a large impact and give them an advantage.
Assuming everyone is healthy and signed, the Leafs would have one left wing spot open on the third line, and three jobs open on the fourth.
Jason Spezza, Nick Shore, Kenny Agosino, Trevor Moore, Nic Petan, Garret Wilson, Jeremy Bracco, Frederik Gauthier, Pontus Aberg and Ilya Mikheyev make for ten players that will try to win those four jobs.
Let’s say the Toronto Maple Leafs make a third line of Mikheyev-Kerfoot-Kapanen. There is a significant chance that that is the best third line in the NHL.
Then if they follow it with Moore-Spezza-Bracco that might be the best fourth line anyone has iced for reasons other than punishing a star player.
The advantages of this set up would be slight, but then again, hockey is a game of margins, so an edge like this could make all the difference.