Toronto Maple Leafs Will Try to Solve Mysterious Islanders

The Toronto Maple Leafs will take on the New York Islanders tonight at the Air Canada Centre.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have won two in a row after losing in overtime to the Rangers last week.  They maintain a nine game point streak.

Also, they are the best team in the NHL since they hired Sheldon Keefe.

And they’ve recently taken the title of highest scoring team in the NHL overall. (Crazy stat: the Leafs have 62 more goals than the Detroit Red Wings in the same amount of games).

Tonight they try to solve the NHL’s biggest mystery: the New York Islanders.

Toronto Maple Leas vs New York Islanders

The Islanders lost their best player to the Toronto Maple Leafs.  They hired their washed up GM who is completely unsuited to run an NHL team in 2020, and he proceeded to make terrible move after terrible move.

(The contracts to Lee, Eberle, Nelson, Hickey, Komorov, Martin are awful; He lost Tavares, and failed to re-sign Lehner (the only reason his first season wasn’t seen as the disaster it actually was) and gave a risky contract to Varlomov. His roster is full of fourth liners, and bad contracts, and he hasn’t made a single good trade since being hired).

The decision to fire Lou Lamoriello and hire Kyle Dubas may just go down as the best transaction in Toronto Maple Leafs history, and I’m including the Doug Gilmour and Mats Sundin trades, and the drafting of Auston Matthews when I say that.

Their statistics suggest a team that should be near the bottom of the standings.

And yet, here we are.  Last year they made the playoffs (with one of the NHL’s worst rosters), and this year they are, again, near the top of the standings.

The Islanders are at or near the bottom in all relevant team stats, including expected goals percentage.  In every category, they are ranked with Detroit, Ottawa, New Jersey and Chicago – i.e the NHL’s worst teams. (stats natururalstattrick.com).

But they rank third in PDO. (Combined save and shooting percentage).

PDO, over time, will revert to 100.  If a team is getting results that do not align with their statistical performance, chances are they are being propped up by unsustainable shooting or save percentages.

This is very clearly the case with the Islanders.

They have the fourth highest save percentage in hockey. For what it’s worth, the three teams ahead of them are also getting much better results than they probably deserve or can sustain (Dallas, Boston, Arizona).

The problem with the Islanders is that they did this last year as well, so people are assuming that they’ve found a way to game the system. They haven’t, and what is happening is just a coincidence, but try telling people that.  (I have, they don’t care. They just say you’re stupid for pointing out crazy things like math and believing in the predictability of numbers).

Fact is, anomalies occur.  It’s unlikely a bad team would get unrealistic and undeserved standings points from hot goaltending two years in a row, but it’s not impossible.

It is bound to happen eventually, and it’s happening right now.  The Islanders are fourth in the NHL in points.  However they are 15th in the last month.

They probably banked enough points to make the Playoffs early in the year, but if you could pick your playoff opponent…….

The Leafs – possibly due to bad Karma for stealing their best player – have done poorly against the Islanders in recent months, but will look to turn that around tonight.

They will have Michael Hutchinson in goal.