The Toronto Maple Leafs will be taking on the Columbus Blue Jackets tonight in game one of their best of five series.
The two teams did finish with the same amount of points, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Blue Jackets are on the same level as the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Leafs didn’t get anything from their back-up goalie position for most of the year. Their former superstar goalie fell back to earth and had a sub-par season.
They failed to play even one game with their optimal lineup. They turned over 1/3 of their roster in the summer, failed to gel under Mike Babcock and then switched coaches in November.
Interestingly, the Leafs actually switched to a pretty radically different style of play after the change, which is something they had to learn on the fly.
They won over 70% of their games for the first half of Keefe’s tenure. They played the other half without their best defenseman, and 25% of those games without their two best defenseman.
For a team already weak on the back-end, that’s too much to overcome.
But yet, under Keefe they played 43 games and finished 8th overall in the NHL.
We know all this, but I figured I should recap, just in case.
But here are a few things no one is talking about:
Toronto Maple Leafs vs Blue Jackets Secrets
The Leafs have a massive coaching advantage. Tortorella is an old-school, unlikable grump. He coaches his team to play Ideal Hockey 101.
Keefe is of the new school, and his possession heavy game that focuses on creating dangerous scoring chances and trades the occasional breakaway against for an increased focus on offense is something the NHL hasn’t really seen before.
The Leafs are a team coached by a tactical genius. Columbus is not.
People talk about Tortoralla as if he’s a genius for taking a collection of nobodies and making them play defense, as if this wasn’t the strategy of every bad team in NHL history. (All stats naturalstattrick.com).
Everyone makes this out to be offense vs defense, but the Leafs game plan is all about exploiting this kind of defense. The key being that in hockey, if you are playing defense, its because you don’t have the puck.
Another thing is that Columbus is that they are where they are because a rookie goalie – who they aren’t even starting – had a crazy run to start his NHL career. Otherwise, a team losing Panarin, Duchene, Dzingle, Bobrovsky and Duclair over one offseason would probably show it more.
The fact is, the Blue Jackets over-achieved like no one else in the NHL and the Leafs massively underachieved.
If the Leafs make their coaching change last summer, then have a healthy year where Andersen is even just average, they are the Cup Favorite right now, after coasting to a President’s Trophy.
But due to all the adversity – you know, the kind people always say teams need in order to learn to win – the Leafs and Blue Jackets have the same amount of points.
Realistically, how is any team supposed to defend when, after putting their best defenders out against Auston Matthews, they now need to face John Tavares and Mitch Marner?
Or what about the fact that out-of-the-blue Zach Hyman and Ilya Mikheyev started putting up legitimate superstar 5v5 numbers?
How do you cope with that defensively, while a third line that features one of the NHL’s beset defensive players, one of its fastest players and some guy who just scored so many goals that he made it to the NHL despite the fact that if he had been born a week later he wouldn’t even be drafted yet.
Oh, and guess what? The Toronto Maple Leafs have a 60 point defenseman on their third pair.
So anyways, Leafs in three. Right? Hardly has their ever been a more lopsided series that people are calling “close.”
Look for the Leafs to live up to my expectations over the next two months.