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.