Last year, the Toronto Maple Leafs power-play wasn’t the advantage to the team that it should have been.
When I look at the unique way this current Toronto Maple Leafs team is built, hinged upon valuing speed and skill over the traditional course of action teams have taken by making toughness a priority, I don’t understand how they have not been able to consistently have a palpable penalty differential as a team.
The leafs no longer have a single player known for taking plenty of penalties such as a Roman Polak, Matt Martin or James “Tiger” Williams, but in 2018-2019 they found themselves at a -1 in team penalty differential while at the same time taking the second least amount of penalties league wide.
Just to envision the way the leafs play hockey, I fail to see how a team as fast and skilled as the leafs with players including, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Auston Matthews and John Tavares can find themselves having a negative penalty differential ending up on the penalty kill more than on the powerplay.
What is the reasoning behind this madness?
In the NHL the referees have a tendency to make the calls for both teams even, which created what we call “The makeup call”.
“The makeup call” is simply when the referee calls a penalty for one team, the majority of the time the next penalty will be called against the other team to makeup for it.
This is why a team such as the Boston Bruins that is known to be a chippy team will find themselves with both among the most penalties taken and penalties drawn in the league, where as the friendly Leafs find themselves having close to the lowest amount of special team situations in the league.
To illustrate this further here is a chart representing PIM taken and PIM against at 5v5;
"Moneypuck"
When observing the graph you may notice the teams are seem scattered but the only team that finds itself with over 1 minute of a difference between PIM’s taken and PIM’s drawn is the Anaheim Ducks, meaning that Anaheim was the only team that ending up being in the penalty box over one minute more than the other team was in the penalty box.
Anaheim found themselves on average with 1.35 more minute’s of penalty’s than the opposing team on a per game basis, which doesn’t even total a full two minute minor penalty. This means that no team in the league even averaged a total of one minor penalty more than the other team on a per game basis.
For the Leafs, they averaged a total of 48 seconds more penalty’s drawn than taken per game, which isn’t even close to totaling one extra two minute power play over the opposition.
Simply put, the referees make the calls even or as close of they possibly can be, whether one team is chippy and the other is friendly, they will end up even in penalties taken and penalties drawn.
This is identical to the series between the Bruins and the Leafs series, where both teams had almost the same penalty minutes called for and against despite the fact that one team is among the cleanest teams in the league and the other is among the dirtiest.
What does this mean for the Leafs?
So you may be wondering how “the makeup call” affects the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the answer is the Leafs style of play with emphasis on speed and skill will not play to their advantage in regards to being on the man advantage more than the other team because no team in the NHL is rewarded for playing a clean game and every team will end up with almost the same amount of penalty minutes taken and drawn.
The Toronto Maple Leafs will likely have close to the least amount of time playing on special teams in the 2019-2020 season again, just based on the roster they have built.
This means as a Leafs fan you will likely see you’re team playing at 5v5 more than most of the other teams in the league. So from now on, don’t get too worked up about a penalty being called against you’re favorite NHL team, because the most likely outcome will be that there will be a penalty called on the opposing team.
Clearly this is a problem that the NHL should fix, because it rewards teams for breaking the rules.