Maple Leafs Training Camp’s Biggest Story Will Be Freddie Andersen

 Freddie Andersen is going to be the biggest story of the Toronto Maple Leafs training camp this season.

The stabilizing presence of good number-one goalie may be the single most important factor in a successful NHL season.  Can Frederik Andersen be that guy in 2020-2021?  Can the great Dane be great one more time?  Let’s take a look.

2019-2020 was a year of high expectations and poor results.  The disparity between what we thought this team was and what they did on the ice was difficult to quantify.  In fact, the only statistic that really stood out was the team SV%.  The Leafs as a team had a 5v5 SV% of .917, which was .07 BELOW league average.

That might not sound like much, but it was the difference between the team being one of the NHL’s best, and being just average.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Freddie Andersen

Let’s consider that last stat for a minute. The Leafs would have allowed roughly 13 less goals at 5v5 over the course of the 70 game season if they had a league average SV%.  Not a good SV%, just a league average one. 

Add to that the snowball effect of not making a routine save and how it negatively impacts your team performance, and it quickly adds up to a subpar season.

Add injuries to key players, and a coaching change, and you basically have a recipe for disaster.  Which is kind of what the Leafs were in 2019-2020.  It’s not hard to connect the dots and see why we were so disappointed.

But, again, this all begins with goaltending.  If Andersen makes a few more saves, is it possible the Leafs don’t even fire Babcock in the first place?  Babcock expected the Toronto Maple Leafs to be better.  We expected the Leafs to be better.  Dubas expected the Leafs to be better.  I thought about all of these layers of bad luck, layers of chaos and futility, and I just couldn’t pin it all on Andersen.  In fact, I put some blame on Andersen myself in an article I wrote about the subpar season that Tavares had.  The Dane just didn’t deserve that…or did he?  I needed to take a deeper look into some numbers to find out.

First, let’s break down the SV% number in a way that reflects some team defense (all stats via hockey-reference.com).

I’ll be using a simple calculation of HDscSA (High Danger scoring chance Shots Against).  If I look at the % of shots that fall into this category, and then compare the 4 seasons that Andersen has had in Toronto, we can get a decent look at how the Leafs defended the high danger areas last year in front of Andersen.

HDscSA     SA          %HDscSA     Year

215            2052      0.10             2016-2017

234            2211      0.11             2017-2018

195            1958      0.10             2018-2019

237            1577      0.15             2019-2020    *

We can clearly see from this table that the % of high danger shots against Andersen in 2019-2020 were significantly higher than in his other seasons as a Leaf.  The numbers are actually quite consistent.  The Maple Leafs just didn’t defend the high danger areas very well last season.  Shots from high danger areas increase xGF numbers in all models, so we know that these shots have a much better chance of going in.

Defense wins championships right?

Next, let’s take a quick look at some “other” factors that could have had a negative impact on Andersen’s performance.

Adding Tyson Barrie was definitely a negative impact on Andersen.  Barrie is a good player that typically has a positive overall impact on the game but he’s bad at defending, and he’s also a new defenseman that Anderson needed to adjust to.  Plenty of articles have been written on Barrie last season so I won’t go into detail, but the things Barrie is good at are not really what the Leafs needed, and by now we all know it just didn’t really work.  Having too many defenders like Barrie can be tough on a goalie.

After a slow start where the team often looked disinterested, Babcock was fired and replaced with Keefe.  I’m a believer in Keefe and I think it was ultimately a good move, but it did mean that Andersen now needed to adjust to a totally new set of systems.  Another layer of chaos that needs to be accounted for.  The Leafs were now trying to control the puck far more than before, with different tactics that changed the pace of the game.  Again, this is an adjustment for a goalie.

Then there were the injuries to key players such as Tavares, Rielly, Muzzin, Dermott, Hyman, and Mikheyev, all of which had a huge negative impact on the defensive conscience of this team.  That absolutely made things tougher for Andersen on a nightly basis.  I’ve already mentioned how bad the Leafs were at defending high danger areas, and this list of names certainly had a lot to do with that.

Lastly, let’s take a look at his career as a whole, and factor in his age and possible decline.

Andersen is remarkably consistent.  His numbers clearly show that he is a good starting goalie and he has consistently had a positive impact on winning for this franchise.  With only one bad season, and multiple factors contributing to that bad season, it’s highly likely that last year will be an aberration and not the new normal for Andersen.

Add the fact that he’s only 30 (not old for a goalie), and has very low mileage considering he’s only been a starter for 5 NHL seasons, I just don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t expect Andersen to fully regress to his former self.  Even an average season by his standards is far superior to the one he had last year.

In conclusion, I may have been a little too harsh with my assessment of Andersen last year.  There’s no doubting the fact that he just didn’t make as many saves has he’s supposed to, but maybe he was just a bi-product of a team that, frankly, didn’t play well for a good chunk of the year.  Maybe he shouldn’t be the scapegoat that some of us painted him as.

If Andersen deserves a mulligan, last year was his mulligan.  Now, let’s see him pick himself back up and be the goalie we all know he can be.  He’s playing for a contract.  He’s playing for the respect that he seems to have lost.  I say let’s get behind him and cheer him on.  He deserves nothing less.