Toronto Maple Leafs: Don’t Count Justin Holl Out Just Yet

The Toronto Maple Leafs signed Zach Bogosian yesterday to a one year, one million dollar contract.

The 30 year old old-school defenseman has been a negative value in the NHL for years, but does provide some of the grit that people are convinced the Toronto Maple Leafs are missing.

I am seeing a whole lot of “Dubas sees the light” narratives floating around, but these don’t really make any sense.  Dubas replaced Kyle Clifford with Wayne Simmonds, which isn’t “seeing the light” since they are more or less the same kind of player, and the Leafs already had one.

Adding Bogosian as the 7th D also doesn’t significantly alter the teams make-up.  BUT if Bogosian is going to be a regular, or even a top four player, that is a different story.

There just isn’t any indication that the Leafs are interested in playing that kind of player higher in the lineup.  Why assume the Leafs are going to give Bogosian the job of a player who is three years younger and makes twice the salary?

It’s clear that the Toronto Maple Leafs believe in Justin Holl, and I think the numbers back that belief up.  Sure, he may yet get traded, but I highly doubt the team with the biggest analytics department in sports history is going to play a terrible player over a good one just to make themselves tougher.

Justin Holl and the Toronto Maple Leafs

Justin Holl is 28 and he’s 6’4 215 lbs.  He remains the only Leafs defenseman who shoots right handed and puts up positive overall results.  I don’t think the Leafs will give up on him at this point, despite the sudden infusion of depth to their blue-line.

Justin Holl scored 17 5v5 points last year despite a preposterous 1.2 shooting percentage. He just failed to crack the top 50 in defenseman scoring, and he scored only 2 less 5v5 points than Shea Theodore, while scoring more than Drew Doughty, and the same as Mikhail Sergachev.

He scored at a rate of .94 points per 60 and that makes him the 38th highest scoring defenseman per minute in the NHL among players who hit at least 1000 minutes, of which there were 99.

No one who scored more than Justin Holl started a lower percentage of their shifts in the offensive zone.  In fact, out of 99 1000 minute defenseman, Holl started the 6th least amount of times in the Ozone.

Justin Holl played some of the hardest, most insane minutes in the NHL last year (along with Partner Jake Muzzin).

His on ice stats (meaning how the Leafs performed when he was on the ice) were as follows:

51.8% puck possession rating

52.34% of the total shots

51.56% of the total goals

53% expected-goals

53% of the total scoring chances

51. 71% of the total dangerous chances.

Again, he started only 39% of his shifts in the offensive zone. Those are CRAZY GOOD numbers consider his deployment.   Also, he put those numbers up playing on an offense-first team with bad defense and terrible goaltending. (All stats naturalstattrick.com)

Considering the amount of difficult minutes Holl played, only Chara played in similar situations and allowed less goals against, but Chara did it with the NHL’s highest save percentage.

A major criticism of Holl is that he was carried by Muzzin.  Now, Muzzin is a 2 Win player who moves the needle and is a borderline star.  The guy is awesome and he basically makes anyone he plays with better.  There is no shame in being better because you played with Muzzin.

But that doesn’t mean that Holl is bad without Muzzin.  The stats available without Muzzin paint Holl as average, abut those include some weird games where both Muzzin and Rielly were out, and given the short sample size, those games are going to have an outsized impact on those numbers.  It is worth noting that when paired with Dermott (over 300 minutes) that Holl was still over 50% and the team’s goal differential was only minus 1.

And, as fellow EIL writer Jordan Maresky pointed out to me only seconds ago, Holl was essentially a rookie last year, despite being an on and off bench player for two years before that.

The bottom line is this: Why would a team known for being bad at defense mess with their only good defensive pairing? Why would a team with no other NHL quality right-handers get rid of their only good right hander?

Why would a team all-in on analytics get rid of a player who has such great results against insane competition?  One who actually scored quite a bit considering he was never put in a position to score?

Justin Holl is crazy underrated and he needs to be retained.  The Toronto Maple Leafs know what they have, and its about time the fans bought in as well.