List of Toronto Maple Leafs Pet Peeves (Enough Is Enough)

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a fantastic hockey team.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are the NHL’s most exciting team to watch, they’ve got the best roster in team history and if you adjust for injuries, they have the NHL’s best team.

But the coverage of the team is so relentlessly negative.

Perhaps its the fact that the team is nearly 60 years since it’s last championship, or perhaps its just the nature of the media.

I don’t know, but I do know it’s extremely frustrating.

The negative coverage that this team gets – undeservedly, because the sins of the past shouldn’t be heaped at the feat of the current regime – is my biggest pet peeve.

Here’s some others.

Toronto Maple Leafs Pet Peeves

Injuries Are Not an Excuse – Yes, they most certainly are.  In fact, injuries play the biggest role in deciding the championships of pro sports leagues, and they always will.

William Nylander – he’s one of the best players to ever play for the Toronto Maple Leafs, he’s got arguably the best contract in the NHL, and he’s also got 30 goals, while being near the top of the league in puck possession, scoring chance and zone-entry statistics.

Oh, and he leads the NHL in net-front goals.  Weird, since his critics often complain that he is a perimeter player.  (Actually it’s not weird at all, since none of the anti-Nylander stuff makes any sense).

He is a bona fide superstar.

Jake Gardiner – he remains the NHL’s most underrated, underappreciated player.  He is the most underrated player in Toronto Maple Leafs history.  He deserved better from fans of this team.

Freddie Andersen worship.  Look, I love him.  But the biggest reason the Leafs barely made the playoffs this year is that he wasn’t very good.  His season grades out as a D- at best.

It’s just weird how NHL broadcasts will blame Nylander for anything they can think up, but will barely mention how the Leafs – if they got just league average goaltending – would be near the top of the league.

Constant Salary Cap Complaints –  mainstream NHL coverage won’t stop talking about if the “Leafs can win with so much money tied up in so few players.”  (Final Answer: They obviously can) .

And yet, in order to get to the bottom of this question, they just ask a bunch of media guys who clearly don’t understand how the math works.

Just ask a game theory expert, or a salary cap expert, or anyone well versed in NHL Analytics.  The math doesn’t lie: the Leafs are probably the best team in the NHL at managing the salary cap, and probably the only team doing it correctly.  (Studs and Duds).

The Leafs lack depth – are you mad?  They played the entire season without once icing their optimal lineup.  At one point they played for two weeks with three of their top six defenseman in the lineup, and they were able to give opportunities to players like Sandin, Liljegren, Rosen, Marincin, Engvall, Malgin etc.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are (objectively, inarguably) a deep team.

Here are some facts to end on:

This illiterates what I was saying earlier about the negative coverage and how it’s my biggest pet peeve surrounding the Toronto Maple Leafs.

They are literally only three wins worse than the two widely acknowledged “best teams in the NHL” despite getting something close to the worst goaltending in the NHL, having peripheral numbers as good or better than both those teams, and playing over 20% of those games without their two best defensemen.

I cannot figure out – other than just pure trolling – how anyone could look at that indisputable information and think the Toronto Maple Leafs are anything but one of the NHL’s three best teams.

It is seriously not unrealistic (at all) to assume Freddie Andersen will be at least league average going forward, or that the Leafs might have won three more games over this time if he was.

To say nothing of the fact that they played several games during this time while the flu ripped through their dressing room, without up to six regulars for some games,  and without three or four at most.

With both Keefe and Rielly in the same game, they have won over 70% of their games.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are one of the NHL’s best teams.  Sophisticated fans at the Centre of the Hockey Universe should easily be able to recognize this, even with he constant barrage of unwarranted media negativity.