The Toronto Maple Leafs are loaded with players doing better than the conversation surrounding them would indicate.
This what happens when save percentage and a bad power-play suppress your chances of winning.
Those are two things that are – more or less – luck based.
Take these two examples:
Team A has strong 5v5 play, but their save percentage is under .900, and their power-play hasn’t been scoring. They have a poor to average record.
Team B has bad 5v5 play, but have a strong save percentage and a good power-play. They have recently won six or seven games in a row.
If you understand that a team’s 5v5 play has a far greater repeatability than either save percentage or power play then you would much rather be Team A in this situation because the probability that they are the better team over time is extremely high.
Team A is the Toronto Maple Leafs, and team B is (either) the Sabres or the Islanders (take your pick).
Now if we look at the rosters of all three teams, it becomes a total no-brainer: the Leafs have by far the best roster of any team in the example.
Which brings me to Tyson Barrie
The first thing that jumps out when you look at Tyson Barrie’s performance as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs so far, is the fact that he has zero goals, five assists and is a minus 5 in 14 games.
That looks bad, and since that is all the average fan cares about, the media repeats it until it’s a “fact” that Tyson Barrie is playing poorly. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Barrie has a possession rating of 54%, which means that when he’s on the ice, the Leafs are getting 54% of the shot-attempts. That is a very, very good number.
The problem is that Barrie has been on the ice for nine goals for, and 17 against. Yikes.
That’s a goals-for percentage of just 34% which is absolutely pathetic.
But if we look into why, we see that it’s easily explainable.
With Tyson Barrie on the ice, the Leafs have gotten only 6% shooting, and 87% goaltending.
Both numbers are preposterous and guaranteed to rise, even if Barrie was to start playing worse on purpose.
Those numbers are improbable at the NHL level. For a guy who frequently gets on the ice with Auston Matthews and John Tavares, the shooting percentage is 100% certain to rise.
Despite what Islander’s apologists and Barry Trotz fans will have you believe, studies have shown that defense has very little to do with shooting percentage over a large sample size. The average quality of shot at the pro level just isn’t ever going to consistently face extreme enough defense (either good or bad) to be effected very much.
So in a few months, we’ll check back on Tyson Barrie and we’ll notice that he seems to be playing a lot better because he no longer has a individual shooting percentage of zero, and his team no longer has one of 6% while he’s on the ice.
Save thing with the goaltending. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).
Barrie’s 54% corsi-for is a much better indicator of his play so far than his counting stats, or his plus/minus.
Now that isn’t to say he’s been perfect – he hasn’t. He definitely is figuring out the transition from Colorado to Toronto, and he isn’t being helped by the fact that Babcock keeps him off the first PP unit and won’t let him roam at 5v5.
But like anyone who has watched this team at all, I probably don’t have to tell you that they’d be better off if Babcock let them roam a bit and let them play to their strengths.