The Toronto Maple Leafs will be opening training camp next week.
Then, after less than a two week camp, the Toronto Maple Leafs will be playing the Montreal Canadiens on January 13th to kick off the 2021, 56 games season.
The Leafs enter the season with more elite players than any other team in hockey, and probably the best depth as well. (They could ice a fifth line of Engvall, Spezza and Simmonds, which would be one of the best 4th lines in the NHL. Meanwhile Bogosian, Lentonen, Dermott and Sandin, the latter three of which are top-four players, will be fighting for regular ice time on the bottom pairing).
There isn’t a team in the league that comes close to their combination of high-end talent and depth. The Leafs will also be playing in a weak division, and their biggest rival for Best in the NHL is without their best player all year.
So what is their biggest worry? Randomness.
Toronto Maple Leafs vs Injuries and Goalies
Last year the Leafs team stats suggested that their goalies should have done much better than they did. While the defense takes the blame, via popular opinion, there really isn’t very much correlation between defense and goaltending at the pro level.
For example, teams like the Islanders, Dallas and Coyotes all had good reputations as strong defensive teams last year because they got good goaltending. The Leafs, in the games where Sheldon Keefe was the coach, allowed less high-danger chances per game than the Islanders did.
They allowed just under one extra dangerous chance per 60 minutes of 5v5 hockey than Arizona or Dallas. But when you rank goalie save percentage, Dallas was 2nd, Arizona 4th, and the Islanders 10th.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were 28th. (stats from naturalstattrick.com).
See: no correlation. The fact is, the Leafs were a great team last year done in by randomly bad goalies and a stretch of 15 or so games where both their two best blue-liners were out with injury.
This off-season, the Leafs added one (Brodie) impact player and lost none. It might be two or three depending on Roberston and Lehtonen. They added toughness, depth, leadership, and defense.
Their only weakness is goaltending, which is almost completely random. Will Freddie Andersen be the elite netminder of years past, or the replacement player of last year? Will the Leafs get any contribution from their back-up? If they did last year, they’d have had a bye in the play-in round, and who knows what would have happened then?
The Leafs, like every team, are at the mercy of injuries and the random nature of goalies. They have set everything in their control up for success, and they are likely to get it. I can’t wait to find out.