Toronto Maple Leafs: Auston Matthews Deserves Hart Trophy

The Toronto Maple Leafs have won very few major awards in their history.

Since expansion beyond six teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs have never had a Hart, Vezina, Art Ross or Norris Trophy Winner.

Sure, Matthews won the Calder, and Pat Burns won the Jack Adams, while Doug Gilmour won the Selke.  Great achievements all, but those are the second class NHL awards.

What fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs would really like to see – beyond a winning a team – is a major individual award.

Leon Draisaitl will win the Hart this season because he has the most points, but Auston Matthews is a more deserving candidate.

The five leading candidates should be Matthews, Panarin, MacKinnon, Pastrnak and Draisaitl. (All stats from naturalstattrick.com).

Auston Matthews for Hart

Matthews has 46 goals, one back of David Pastrnak of the Bruins.  Matthews, however, has 30 5v5 goals, four more than Alex Ovechkin and four more than Pastrnak.

5v5 goals are harder to score, and they do more to help your team win than power-play goals.  It is better to lead the league in 5v5 goals than it is to lead in PP goals.

Also mentioned in the Hart trophy race is Nathan MacKinnon but he has only 18 5v5 goals.  Panarin has 21, Draisatil 22.

Panarin, MacKinnon, Pastrnak and Draisaitl all have more points than Matthews does (both 5v5 and overall) but his even-strength goal scoring outshines theirs and that should be the most important statistical consideration.

Statistical Analysis

If you look into the seasons each of the five candidates are having, I think Matthews comes out as having the best season.

Corsi  

Corsi (shot-attempts) is a good stat for showing who drives play. The sample size of shot-attempts is the largest of any stat, making it the most reliable.

Pastrnak has a 54.53% CF, leading all candidates.  Matthews is next with 54.20, a virtually identical score.  MacKinnon is also close, while Panarin is barely getting over 50%.

Draisaitl’s team allows more shot attempts when he is the ice, meaning he is heavily trading in the defense in favor of offensive chances.  Draisaitl’s CF is just under 48%.

High Danger Chances

If we look at high-danger chances, we see that Matthews is the best. When he is on the ice, his team gets more dangerous chances than any of the other players.

Assuming that highly skilled offensive players will trade off some measure of defensive responsibility in order to try and score goals, high-danger chances gives us a good idea of whether or not such risks are worth while.

Despite the gaudy numbers, Pastrnak’s team trades dangerous chances evenly when he’s on the ice, while Draistail’s team only gets 47% of the total dangerous chances.

Panarin’s team gets 52% of the dangerous chances, while MacKinnon’s gets 54%.

The best? You guessed it.  The Toronto Maple Leafs get 56% of all dangerous chances when Auston Matthews is on the ice.

Goals and Expected Goals

Panarin’s team has so far picked up 66% of the total goals scored while he’s on the ice.  Pastrnak is just slightly behind at 65%, while Matthews and MacKinnon each have a solid 60% goals-for rating.

Once again, Draistail is the worst of our candidates, with the Oilers getting just 52% of the goals scored while he’s out there.

Goals, however, are rarely scored, so it is important to put them into context.  Expected-Goals attempts to do this by coming up with a number that is more representative of actual play and unaffected by luck.

Matthews leads in expected goal percentage with a 55% rating.

MacKinnon 54%, Pastrnak 54% , Draisaitl 49%, Panarin 46%.

If we look at  on-ice shooting percentage (players can’t control it) we can see luck factors in:

Panarin 12.44%, Pastrnak 11.38%, Draisaitl 11.23%, MacKinnon 10.54% and Auston Matthews 9.56%.

Conclusion

Auston Matthews should win the Hart Trophy.

Not only does he lead the NHL in the single most important statistic – 5v5 goals – but his underlying numbers are better than the other candidates.

Matthews is virtually tied with Pastrnak for the best shot-attempt differential among candidates. Matthews’ team gets significantly more high danger chances than any other candidates’s team does, when he’s on the ice.

This means that of all the Hart Trophy Candidates, Matthews sacrifices the least on defense in order to score so much. Or to put it another way, he scores at a similar rate to everyone else, while being a much better defensive player.

Panarin and Draisaitl are having amazing years, but they have gaudy numbers because of high on-ice shooting percentage (which can’t be sustained) and because they ignore defense in order to score goals.

If their shooting percentage dropped – which it almost certainly will over time – they would become liabilities to their teams, even though they score a lot.  It doesn’t matter if you score eight goals if you lose 9-8.

Matthews is easily the best at creating offense without sacrificing defense.

If luck was not a factor, Matthews would score the most goals.  He leads in expected goals, while having the lowest shooting percentage and playing the best defense among candidates, with MackInnon a close second.

Honestly, MacKinnon and Matthews are so close that you could pick either one and be correct. I lean towards Matthews because he scores more individual goals than MacKinnon does.

Either way, both are better candidates than Draisaitl or Panarin.  It’s easy to just pick the guy with the best point totals, but it’s not an accurate representation of who the best player is.

And the best player is who we are choosing here.  I consider the idea that “the most valuable to his team” means something different than “best player” to be ridiculous.  MVP awards are for the best player, and any I dismiss any kind of linguistics gymnastics out of hand.

Auston Mattews is the best player in the NHL this season, he has the same amount of 5v5 primary points as Leon Draisaitl, but he has eight more goals and his team actually performs better when he’s on the ice.  We’ll see what happens over the next 15 or so games, at this point he’s the deserving Hart Trophy Winner.