Toronto Maple Leafs: A look at Quality of Competition

Which Toronto Maple Leafs players play the toughest minutes?

Many around the hockey world put a lot of emphasis on the quality of competition (QoC) that a player is thrust into by his coach, the Toronto Maple Leafs coaching decisions have been well documented regarding this.

To provide some solid evidence I think it’s important to understand the amount of time that players play against the other team’s best players. A friend of mine @TopDownHockey on twitter recently made a tableau that lists every player’s time on ice (TOI) against the other teams’ best players. I think some elements of the results will surprise a lot of people.

To clear things up first, the metric we are using to define the TOI played against top competition is called TOI QoC% (time on ice, quality of competition percentage) which represents the amount of time a specific player was on the ice against the other teams best players (top line/top d-pairing).

The first thing I would like to mention is the maximum TOI QoC% is around 31% and the minimum is around 24%. The data I am using here is strictly for the 2019-2020 season with a minimum TOI required for each player on the list so there is no sample bias.

Another point I would like to make is as the data is from the 2019-2020 season as the whole, there is no way to deviate between the difference with or without Babcock as the coach unfortunately.

Here is the link to the amazing data  provided by TopDownHockey.

 Toronto Maple Leafs Quality of Competition

To start, the players that were highest on the list in terms of TOI Qoc with a range of 29.72 to 29.35 include, Mitch Marner, Zach Hyman, Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Morgan Rielly, and Jake Muzzin.

The players that found themselves within the middle ground of matchups with TOI QoC% from 29.26 to 28.97 are, Nylander, Ceci, Johnsson, Mikheyev, and Kerfoot.

Lastly, the players that were more clearly put in a sheltered position with a TOI Qoc% ranging from 28.78 to 27.76 in order include, Barrie, Kapanen, Dermott, Marincin, Sandin, Engvall, Spezza, Liljegren, Gauthier, and Petan.

It will be interesting to see how these numbers differ under a full season with Sheldon Keefe behind the bench.

The major tale of the data is how minuscule of a difference there is between each player and how much they play against the other teams’ best players. The reality of the current NHL is that every player is on the ice against the other teams’ best players unless they are playing under 5 minutes a night which is not really a realistic threshold.

The difference in TOI QoC% is also of note, where unless a team is running 7 defensemen on a given night, every defensemen will be forced to play against the other teams best players for a notable amount of time. For forwards it is easier to shelter certain players with the fact that there are 4 lines of forwards and only 3 pairings of defensemen.

Therefore it tends to be more of a loss when defensemen get injured because the guy replacing whoever injured will not have the opportunity to be eased into a sheltered role.

Another takeaway from this fact is this is likely why it takes defensemen longer to develop into NHL players because once they are in the NHL, they are playing against the other teams’ best players no matter what.

A good takeaway from this data overall is that the Toronto Maple Leafs young defensemen have plenty more time to develop into strong NHL defensemen as some of the best defensemen in today’s NHL only got accumulated to the league in their mid 20’s.