Toronto Maple Leafs Biggest Advanced Stats Surprises

The Toronto Maple Leafs are one of the NHL’s most polarizing teams.

Even half of their own fans don’t like the direction of the Toronto Maple Leafs, choosing to pine away for hockey’s lost days of fighting and guessing about player decisions.

But the Leafs current regime is all-in on the leading edge of a new way to run an NHL team.

The Leafs assistant GM wrote the salary cap rules, and the Leafs have focused on assembling a core of highly paid elite players, and filling out the rest of their roster with the bevy of always available highly skilled, underpaid players.

The team focuses on a possession heavy play style that favors offense and creativity of scoring chances over shutting down the opponents.

To say that the NHL’s biggest market and premier team trying to completely re-invent the wheel has been controversial would be to undersell it.

Anyways, with no hockey for the foreseeable future, I thought it would be interesting to point out some of the biggest surprises on the Leafs roster, if viewed through the lens of advanced stat.

I have new fun toy from twitter uses @jfresh who has created fun, easy to digest player cards that contain much of the necessary advanced stat information.

Toronto Maple Leafs Advanced Stats Surprises

The stats for these cards come from evolving-hockey.com and naturalstattrick.com, and are made by @jresh.

As you can see from the card above, Morgan Rielly was worth almost 4 wins during last seasons incredible Norris Worthy season.  This year he was injured and not as effective, but don’t forget the Leafs won 70% of the games he played under new coach Sheldon Keefe.

One surprise from Rielly’s card was how terrible he is defensively. I mean, we always knew it was bad, just not this bad.

Another thing I learned scanning through the Toronto Maple Leafs roster was that Freddie Andersen only had a quality start in 46% of his games this year, down from 57% last year.

Alex Kerfoot was worth 1.4 Wins above a replacement player (very good) and had a market value for his play that was over $2 million dollars more than his actual salary.

Unsurprisingly, Frederick Gauthier is a replacement player.

Jason Spezza was worth 1.8 wins, which is crazy.

Another crazy bargain, Illya Mikheyev being worth 2.3 wins.

Though he had a good year last season, Kasperi Kapanen was basically a replacement level player this season.

In the last three seasons, Zach Hyman has been worth 1.5, 1, and 1.9 wins, respectively.  That’s pretty decent.

Cody Ceci not only is a negative value player, but he also has negative value on the PK, his supposed best feature.

Only Pierre Engval and Jason Spezza came anywhere close to matching the even-strength defense of Alex Kerfoot, and both those guys play much easier minutes.

Those are your advanced stats surprises.