Some Very Good Reasons to be Optimistic About the Toronto Maple Leafs
The Toronto Maple Leafs are not having the year that we envisioned them having back in the summer.
It goes without saying that no one was expecting the NHL to postpone and potentially cancel the rest of the season, but for the sake of our sanity, I think it best to continue on writing about the Toronto Maple Leafs as if there will be a season and a Stanley Cup this year.
That may or may not be what happens, but if we can’t watch hockey to distract ourselves, we can at least still argue about it with our friends!
The Toronto Maple Leafs finished last season by taking the eventual Cup Finalist Boston Bruins to seven games in the first round.
The worst part of the loss was having to hear people repeat the narrative about the Leafs needing to be a tougher, grittier team like the Bruins, despite the fact that the Leafs outplayed Boston over the seven games, and perhaps even deserved the win.
There’s no shame in losing to the team that has been the best in the NHL for nearly a decade, and the Leafs didn’t so much “lose” as “take a major step in gaining experience for their young team.”
But instead of a feel-good narrative like “young team takes necessary step in evolution to championship,” somehow the Toronto Maple Leafs are a disappointment because their 22 year old core couldn’t beat a team that had contended for the Stanley Cup for a decade straight.
Sure, this year’s team has been terribly inconsistent, and often nights just plain terrible. But you would be forgiven, given the coverage of the team, if you didn’t realize they were still the league’s seventh youngest team, in year five of the vaunted five-year rebuild.
Again, I acknowledge that it hasn’t been the best season. From a six game losing streak that seems to have ended Mike Babcock’s career, to the failure to get even one win from their back-up goalie for several months, to the recent West Coast Debacle, the team has tested the patience of even their most optimistic fan.
Just kidding!
That fan is me, and I remain extremely optimistic. So I am here to take you through the reasons why you should ignore the doomsayers and believe in this team.
And there are a lot of them. You wouldn’t know it by the coverage the team gets, but they are gaining ground in the standings.
Reason #10: Depth Down the Middle
The Toronto Maple Leafs are the best team in the NHL down the middle, and the gap between them and the second best team is massive.
The Leafs have Auston Matthews at 1C and he’s on pace for about 60 goals, and is the league’s best 5v5 goal scorer since he came into the NHL.
He’s a legitimate Hart Trophy candidate who is also excellent defensively. He leads all NHL forwards with over 1000 minutes of ice time in Corsi, as well as goals.
At 2C the Leafs have John Tavares, the captain. He is just below a point per game and on pace for over 30 goals, while also putting up excellent peripheral numbers. He is in competition for the best second line centre in the NHL with Evgeni Malkin.
The last two centre ice positions on the Toronto Maple Leafs are taken up by Alex Kerfoot and Jason Spezza.
Kerfoot’s low on-ice save percentage is making him look bad, but he’s actually put up great numbers in his first season as a Leaf 52% Corsi, 53% of both regular and high danger scoring chances, and 52% expected goals.
He is the Leafs best defensive forward, and he only has slightly worse scoring numbers than Nazem Kadri, while putting up significantly better underlying numbers across the board.
As for Spezza, he’s scoring at close to a first line rate from a limited fourth line role and is having a fantastic season. There’s not a better group of centres one-through-four in the NHL.
Sheldon Keefe
I’ve seen a lot of “Keefe’s recent record was as bad as Babcock’s so maybe they shouldn’t have fire Babcock” arguments lately.
As someone who argues about the Leafs for a large portion of every day, I just want to emphatically state that that is one of the worst ones I’ve heard.
It ignores the fact that Babcock should have been fired in the summer, and it ignores what Keefe has had to deal with lately – specifically 9 games with without his two best defenseman.
The facts are that Keefe has done an excellent job with the Toronto Maple Leafs so far.
Despite playing nine games without his two best defenders (including several with three of his top six missing) the Toronto Maple Leafs somehow have the ninth best record in the NHL since Keefe was hired.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called an idiot because I criticized the one-line wonder Colorado Avalanche, but they have just three points more than the Leafs since November 21st when Keefe was hired.
Leafs are 6th in ROW (wins in overtime + regulation) since Keefe was hired, and 8th by points-percentage).
If you can be the 9th best team in hockey over 46 games (over half a seasons) while playing nine of 46 games without your two best defenseman, I think you might be OK.
Goaltending
As humans, all of us are guilty of recency bias. This means we value the present moment and things that are happening in it more than we do the past or future.
It means that we put too much weight on current events instead of looking at the big picture. This is especially true in sports where everyone has an opinion, but few people have the time to spend making sure that opinion is well informed.
Hockey is a somewhat poorly designed game, in that one player – the goalie – has an outsized affect on the outcome.
The worst team in the league can put up a great record if they get great goaltending. Our recency bias makes us big believers in teams getting great goaltending, but the inverse of this is that we often don’t believe in teams getting bad goaltending.
For instance, Dallas, Colorado and Boston are all getting over 93% goaltending on the season. This is impossible to maintain, and when those teams inevitably face regression, they won’t seem as good as they are today.
This doesn’t mean they aren’t good teams, just that they’re not as good as they seem. Same goes with teams that aren’t getting good goaltending.
Despite stats that indicate they should have better records, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Vegas Golden Knights are sitting 28th and 26th in overall team save percentage.
The Leafs are 14th overall and the Knights are 9th overall. The fact that they are doing so well despite their low goaltending ranking suggest very good things for the future.
Under Keefe, the Leafs are 9th and have the 27th best goaltending.
If you believe that Freddie Andersen can be at least a league average goalie (and he’s been Vezina Quality in front of brutal defensive teams for three or four years in a row) then you should believe the Leafs will get better in the future.
Team Stats
Two best statistics we have for predicting future success are corsi-for (shot attempt percentage) and expected goals.
The Toronto Maple Leafs are 6th in the NHL in Corsi-for percentage. They have the puck 52% of the time.
Under Keefe they are 8th.
The Leafs are 12th overall in expected-goal percentage, and 6th under Sheldon Keefe.
These strong numbers indicate that we are correct in blaming the majority of the Leafs problems so far this year on goaltending.
Even despite their injury problems, the Toronto Maple Leafs have the sixth best expected goal rating since they changed coaches.
Now imagine that for a quarter of those games they weren’t missing their two best defenseman, or had gotten even league average goaltending.
At the end of the day, only results matter. The team was supposed to be good and they haven’t been. I get that.
Next. Under Normal Conditions, Did the Leafs Have a Chance?. dark
But if we are trying to decide if they should stay the course or get a GM who will operate in a more traditional fashion, it’s important to note that all the evidence says they will be a better team in the immediate future than they have been so far this season.