5 Reasons to Remain Optimistic About the Toronto Maple Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs had a pretty disappointing season.

The Toronto Maple Leafs began their season with Mick Babcock at the helm, despite every indication that he was not the right coach for the team  after last year’s loss to Boston.

The critics proved to be right, as Babcock had clearly lost the team and the room.  The Leafs stumbled – with an injured roster – and it culminated in a six game losing streak that saw Babcock fired.

The Leafs entered this season with hopes to compete for a Stanley Cup and some of the highest expectations that the franchise has seen in years.  Those expectations were not met, but my hypothesis is that the team faced a series of events, which, taken individually each would be easily labeled as unlucky, but when taken together, paint an unflattering portrait of a team.

This unflattering portrait has been the basis for every member of the hockey media with an axe to grind or a story to sell to pile on.  I believe, however, that the Toronto Maple Leafs remain one of the NHL’s elite teams, and that the future remains very bright for them.

In the following paragraphs, I am going to outline why I believe that the Leafs deserve the benefit of the doubt, and that they will be one of the NHL’s best teams whenever next season begins.

Despite this year’s negative results, the Toronto Maple Leafs still have the NHL’s best roster, and do not need many (if any) changes heading into next season to have a reasonable shot at the Stanley Cup.

Reason for Optimism #1: Youth

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a team built around a sure-fire Hall of Famer in his prime, and a 22 year old superstars.

Had the Leafs won the Cup this year, they would have been one of the youngest teams to ever do so.  The core of this team – Rielly, Tavares, Nylander, Marner and Matthews – have years to grow together, and they have not yet peaked.

Matthews has been the best 5v5 goalscorer in the NHL since he played his first game (statistical fact).  If advanced analytics were more mainstream, a good argument to give him the Hart Trophy this season could have been made (especially if the season was finished and he won the goal scoring title, which was likely).

A lot of people think Nathan MacKinnon might be the NHL’s best player today, but he is two years older than Matthews.

MacKinnon 4th year: 16 goals, 37 points, 53 points, and the third straight year he failed to match his rookie total.

Matthews 4th year: 47 goals, 80 points, legitimate Hart Trophy Candidate. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

Sure, we all wish the Leafs were still playing and in the position that the Avalanche are right now, but in their franchise player’s sixth season they are in a better position in which to succeed.

The Leafs of today are miles ahead of the Avalanche of MacKinnon’s fourth season.

Reason for Optimism #2: Back-Up Goalies

The Toronto Maple Leafs played Michael Hutchinson in net for 15 games and out of a possible 30 points in game he played, they got nine.

We know that (more or less) NHL goalies are completely random.  In retrospect, the decision to stick with Sparks over Curtis McElhinney, and then subsequently stick with Hutchinson so long is almost indefensible.

The thing is though, no one could have predicted Sparks failure. He was a goalie the team had spent millions developing, and who had won an AHL championship.  McElhinney had a higher cap hit and was much older.

The decision was a no-brainer and just because it didn’t work out doesn’t change that fact.  Additionally, the unpredictable nature of goalies at the pro level makes spending assets and cap space on them a fool’s errand.

The fact that Hutchinson took a team that otherwise got points in 70% of their games and turned them into the 30th place Ottawa Senators is a statistical fluke.  As bad as Hutchinson was/is,  if you replayed those games a million times, the Leafs will almost always do better than they did.

Now this doesn’t change the fact that the Hutchinson was brutal and Dubas botched the back-up situation, but it is a situation so unlikely to repeat itself that it can be all but ignored in our evaluations and predictions for next season.

Reason for Optimism #4: New Guys and Flexibility

The Toronto Maple Leafs are making a mockery of the media’s analysis of their salary cap and team building strategy.  Despite being told that they can’t maintain a roster consisting of four elite forwards, the Leafs continue to defy their critics at every turn.

There are two basic tenets that govern the Leafs strategy:

1.  In the NHL elite players drive wins.  Over a large sample size, only 10% of the NHL has a major impact on the games.  This means that in a cap world, its not smart to spend money on mid-range players because cheap players can usually provide 90% of their contributions for 50-90% less money.

Thus bringing us to

2.  Effective players are always available for free.  Why give Kevin Hayes $8 million in free agency when you can sign Ilya Mikheyev for the league minimum?  Why pay Jordan Staal when Pierre Engvall is only slightly worse for 66% less money?

This strategy has given the Leafs a ton of flexibility.  They were able to replace Kasperi Kapanen with Alex Barabanov, save $2 million dollars, get their draft pick back and pick up a pretty good prospect too.

They were able to replace Travis Dermott, who needs a new contract but has excellent trade value, with Miko Lehtenon who will make the league minimum.

Finally, they’ll be able to replace Andreas Johnsson with 19 year old Nick Robertson.  This gives them two trade chips and a potential cap savings of three or four million.

The team may end up better with Robertson, Lehtenon and Barabanov instead of Johnsson, Kapanen and Dermott but they for sure won’t be worse.

Reason for Optimism 4: Coaching

The problem with Mike Babcock was that he had so much success doing things his way that a team made him the highest paid coach of all-time, and then that same team made a guy who saw the game in a diametrically opposed way his boss.

It was clear every time Babcock spoke to the media that he wasn’t on the same page as the Toronto Maple Leafs organization, so the team made a change.  One that, had they made is sooner, they would likely still be playing right now.

Sheldon Keefe not only took over a team mid-season, but he asked them to play a completely different style of hockey.  All you have to do is watch the Leafs for ten minutes to see that they play a lot differently than other NHL teams.

The Leafs concentrate on short passes to break the puck out, and they circle back constantly if they don’t like their read.  They play a possession heavy game that prefers holding on to the puck to tossing it on the net for a low-quality chance.

It’s one thing to switch systems, but its another thing entirely to do it in the middle of the season. Despite that, the Leafs got points in 70% of the games in which Morgan Rielly played and Keefe was the coach. Sure, the team fell off a bit towards the end of the regular season, but I don’t know what people expect when an already weak blue-line is down their two best players.

The fact is that under Keefe the Toronto Maple Leafs put up team stats similar to Tampa and better than Boston. They were the 8th best overall team from November 21st until the season was abruptly ended in March. They did that despite missing Rielly for over half of those games, and both Rielly and Muzzin for about 25% of them.

They also got extremely bad goaltending, and succeeded despite that.  Overall, there is every reason to expect that, going forward, Keefe will only build on the early success that he has had so far.