The Toronto Maple Leafs Secretly Amazing Season

Toronto Maple Leafs Really Are the Best Team in the NHL

The NHL is a salary cap league with near full parity. In addition, hockey is a game in which one player (the goalie) has an outsized impact.  Therefore, the standings are not a great way to measure which teams are the best.

Most games are coin-flips, and most teams are fairly evenly matched.  It is estimated that until you have a sample size approaching 75 games, that luck has a bigger impact on results than skill does.

But everyone – on some level – understands that standings don’t tell the whole story.  After-all, why have any analysis if they do?  Or why have a playoff tournament?

So we know we can’t trust the standings, but it is still really hard to get people to listen to you when you are saying trying to say that a team with no history of winning is secretly the best team around.

I get it.

But hear me out.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Unusual Approach

Until they win a championship, any team trying to be innovative will be intensely criticized.   If that innovation is more or less telling an entire group of professionals that they don’t really know what they are doing, then the criticize will be even more intense.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are the first team in NHL history to go with a ‘studs and duds’ approach to the salary cap. 

The Leafs assistant GM / capologist helped write the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Salary Cap rules.  The team clearly knows what they are doing, but the criticism of their approach is nearly universal.

The Leafs are the first team, to my knowledge, to ever intentionally dress six puck-moving defenseman, and to build their bottom six forward group around the idea that skill should be the most important factor.

The Leafs are the only team , that I know of, to intentionally focus on skilled players at the draft who fall because their size or age makes them underrated.   We may need a couple years to see if this works, but the results so far are stunning.

The Leafs are also the only team I know of who have 15 options for the bottom of their lineup at around a million dollars per year.  The flexibility they have given themselves with these options is unreal.  People say they can’t add to their team, but with so many bargains, and so many options, they definitely can.

Not only do the Leafs do all this weird stuff, but they play a style of hockey that involves holding on to the puck, swarming on defense, and taking risks to try and score goals.  They do not focus on defense the way in which we have been taught NHL teams should.

They Leafs don’t have any physically imposing players, they don’t fight, they don’t throw big hits and they don’t play the game ‘the right way,’ according to the worst of their critics.

When you combine all this weird stuff, it’s no wonder that the NHL world at large isn’t lining up to sing their accolades.   Instead, Leafs haters, media types who are protective of the way things have always been, and fans of the team who don’t like this approach are chomping at the bit to fire Dubas, or at least see him fall on his face.

And if you only go by the standings, you can see why.

Toronto Maple Leafs Secretly Amazing Season

When the season went on pause, the Leafs had played 70 games and were in a three-way tie for sixth in the Eastern Conference.  They were on pace to make the playoffs, but just by the skin of their teeth.

They were almost certain to finish the year with less points than last year.

But all this does is obscure the truth, which is that they are probably the best team in the NHL.

What the Leafs accomplished during some less-than-ideal circumstances should prove that they are among the NHL’s best, but I accept that until they actually win most people will fail to recognize this.

The Leafs entered the year with two major players on injured reserve, with somewhere between a third and half of their roster overhauled during the off-season.

The coach continued to go off-roading with the Porsche of a roster he was given, and he was eventually fired after the team lost six in a row.

A losing streak like that, in a league with nearly full parity where the best team usually only wins 51% of the time, should pretty much end the season.

But despite having to learn a new system, with  new coach, the Leafs excelled under Keefe and were the 8th best team in the NHL from November 21st (when Keefe was hired) to the day the season was paused.

They did this even though their best defenseman missed 23 games.  Even though there were several games where they were missing six regulars.  Even though they played nine games without their two best defenseman.

And even though they didn’t once – not even for a single game – dress their optimal lineup.

Now factor in the black-hole that was their back-up goalie position.

And factor in how the NHL is a game in which goalies decide almost everything, but the Leafs managed to finish 8th overall despite having the 24th best goaltending.

Here are the top five teams in the NHL from Nov. 21st onwards, with their goaltender ranking in parenthesis.

Boston (1), Tampa (4), Philly (19), Colorado (5), St.Louis (6).

In 80% of cases, the teams who are at the top of the standings are the teams that got great goaltending.  If a team vastly outperforms it’s goaltending, they are probably much better than the standings say.

And that is without even factoring in the injuries, roster turnover, and learning of a new system.  (All stats naturalstattrick.com).

Obviously some in game statistics are going to be more predictive than the current standings, so check this out (from a past article).

Since Keefe was hired: Overall Standings: Boston 1st overall, TB 2nd , Toronto 8th Puck Possession: Tampa 5th, Toronto 8th, Boston 11th Expected Goals Percentage: Tampa 3rd, Toronto 5th, Boston 7th Scoring Chances Percentage: TB 3rd, Toronto 5th, Boston 7th PDO (It measures luck, so the higher you are ranked, the luckier you were) Tampa 1st, Boston 7th, Toronto 15th. Save Percentage:Boston 1st, Tampa 4th, Toronto 24th.

I think that if you go through all the information available, you can see why people don’t believe in the Leafs, and you can see why some people want to see them fail.

You can see how they are trying to innovate a new way of team building, and how they do not hold with classic NHL team building strategies and ideas.

You can easily see how this leads to criticism, and how, when results don’t go their way, it gets harder and harder see the truth for the myriad of narratives.

But you can also see that despite a litany of reasons (bad goaltending, injuries, a new coach) for their record, the stats show they are actually right there with Tampa, Boston and Vegas.

If a team can still finish eight overall in the standings despite all the things that happened, it’s reasonable to think that under ideal conditions, they are probably a better team than 8th.

And yeah, teams are going to have injuries.  But they usually won’t have six injuries at once, all to impact players, after turning over a third of their roster, while learning a new system, for a new coach, with their goalie having the worst season of his career.

The Leafs were 8th overall, with some very obvious reasons for not being higher, and they also put up statistics consistent with the NHL’s other best teams.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are something approaching the NHL’s best team, and time is eventually going to make this indisputable.  But for now, until they win, you should definitely be happy with the team’s progress.

Their secretly successful season demands it.