How Have the Toronto Maple Leafs Big Four Performed So Far?

Auston Matthews Play Analysis

Matthews has five goals and nine points in eight games.  This is more than a 50 goal pace despite the fact that he’s shooting under 10% 5v5 when his career shooting percentage is closer to 15%.

You’d really like to see Matthews get more assists, but those are bound to come.  The scary thing is that the 50 goal pace is now expected, and we can clearly see there’s goal-per-game potential there.  Matthews is hands down the best player in Toronto Maple Leafs history, from a talent perspective at least.

The crazy thing about Auston Matthews is that he really shooting just 4.7% if you don’t count the goal he scored off his foot that didn’t even shoot into the net.  Dating back to his playoff performance last year (which was spectacular but he was stone-cold unlucky) he has two goals on 42 shots (again, ignoring the fluke goal), which is still 4.7 %

Matthews has been the NHL’s best 5v5 goal scorer since (literally) his first game in the NHL (he scored four times, if you recall).  He is, roughly, a 15% career shooter, so we can all-but guarantee that this unlucky streak will eventually reverse course.

Once this happens – and it will certainly happen – the Toronto Maple Leafs become a much more difficult team to face.

So far this season Matthews has a 56% puck possession rating (very high) and the Leafs are getting 53% of the shots when he’s on the ice. 60% of the scoring chances, 55% of the dangerous scoring chances. And yet,   Matthews expected goals is down to 51% from last year’s 55%.

He’s been unlucky, Thornton got injured (the line was DOMINANT early), and there was an injury. Overall I wouldn’t be too concerned and would expect the expected-goals numbers to rise quite a bit.

To put into perspective how good Matthews is, consider that he is over a point-per-game, and one off the league lead in total goals, but we are seriously saying that he is a) not playing his absolute best (his numbers are crazy good, but historically, he’s got another level) and b) getting significantly unlucky.

Look out goalies!

Mitch Marner

Mitch Marner is second in the NHL in goals, and second in the NHL in points, prior to Saturday’s action.  The counting numbers are off-the charts and he’s scoring at a 114 point pace.  If you for some reason put any stock into the charisma deficient TV intermission analysis, you’d think that he was playing amazing.

And he isn’t playing badly, but I think he, like his team, has been getting some pretty fortunate results. It is unfortunate that people will think this means that I don’t like him, or that I’m some how saying he is a bad player, or that I have some kind of anti-Marner bias.  Marner is one of the best players the Leafs have ever had. I have waited my entire life for the Leafs to have a player like Mitch Marner on their roster.

I also don’t particularly care about his salary or anything like that.  I am just simply saying that it’s very easy to equate high point totals with great play, and that that isn’t necessarily always the case.  It is especially not the case here.

William Nylander is flirting with a 60% corsi (comparable to batting .400 in baseball) but Marner has the lowest rating of the Leafs Big Four at 51.53%.  Marner is shooting 23% 5v5 and 27% overall.  His PDO is over one-hundred, while the less lucky Tavares and Nylander line is around 98.

This isn’t to say that Marner is playing poorly, he isn’t.  He just isn’t playing at the insane-out-of-this-world level that people are making him out to be.   With a just-this-side-of-positive Corsi, other teams are actually outshooting the Leafs with Marner on the ice.

Here is the difference Joe Thornton made so far (and it is a small sample, but it’s not meaningless):

With Thornton, 52 minutes,  Marner is a 70% player.

Without Thornton, 34 minutes,  Marner is a 44% player.

The fact is that despite his point totals, with Marner on the ice the Leafs are only expected to get 45% of the goals. Whether you accept these stats or not is completely irrelevant:  over the long term it is a 100% guarantee that “expected goals” will better predict the future than “actual goals.”

Now of course there are other factors here – quality of competition (Leafs have played four games against Connor McDavid and Marner plays against him a lot), quality of team mates (Rielly and Brodie aren’t exactly dominating games), no training camp, an insane schedule, etc.

Nobody is saying Marner has been bad.  He’s been good.  But he is a top player in the NHL playing with another top player in the NHL. Whatever the circumstances are he goes up against, the end results can’t be a negative, which they currently are despite the points.

So while the early point totals are nice, Marner has been outplayed by at least two of the Toronto Maple Leafs big four.  Keep in mind that of his 13 points, six are on the power-play and two are into empty nets.

John Tavares

Tavares is third on the Leafs with 14 individual 5v5 shots and a bizarrely unlucky ZERO PERCENT shooting percentage.  That is right – no 5v5 goals for Johnny T yet.

This is exhibit A in why the Leafs record is a) so lucky and b) not likely to crash and burn despite the luck.  I mean, you won’t always get so lucky, but you will make up for that by having two of the NHL’s best 5v5 goal scorers actually start to score goals.

Luckily, Tavares does have four PP goals and 5 PP points in total.  He’s got eight points in eight games despite being snakebitten at 5v5.

To truly appreciate Tavares’ game, you’ve got to look at the on-ice numbers.  On-ice numbers for some reason get called “advanced” but they are really basic – essentially they are just a differential of how the team performs with the player on the ice.   It’s really common sense based stuff too, if your team gets more shot-attempts, shots, scoring chances or goals than the other team when you play, it’s probably a sign that you are playing well.

Tavares has a 52% puck possession rating (shot attempts aka Corsi)  this is 5th among Leafs forwards who’ve played 8 games. The Leafs are splitting the shots evenly when Tavares plays, and getting slightly more scoring chances.  Overall, he’s still got a negative expected goals rating, which is probably because of the zero goals thing – I don’t think he’s actually hurting the team with his play or anything.

I ranked Marner lower than Tavares in terms of overall play, but that is strictly because Tavares doesn’t get to play with Matthews.  Both could use some improvement in their 5v5 games.

William Nylander

After scoring 31 goals (on pace to beat Phil Kessel’s career high) and leading the NHL in net-front power-forward type goals, as well as posting MVP esque “advanced” stats, you would assume that Nylander would be hailed as a superstar on par with the Leafs other big three.

But you would be discounting how embarrassed the Toronto/NHL media is about being proven completely wrong in their analysis of this player.  Everyone on hockey TV, from Brian Burke to Darren Dreger, insisted, for years, that the Leafs couldn’t sign/keep/play four top forwards.

They suggested constantly that Nylander should be traded for a defenseman (usually a terrible one, and usually with no indication that they remember this).

They insisted that Nylander was soft, and all but demanded the Leafs to trade him.  They practically guaranteed that they would.

They didn’t.

And Nylander became about ten-times better than they ever thought possible. Rather than admit their error, they have just doubled down on it to the point of self-parody.

At one point this year, Nylander had a stellar game where he had two assists and on-ice stats that suggested he completely dominated the game.  No mention of this on TV though, just constant replays of Draisaitl blowing by him once, as if the absolute human tank that is Leon Draisaitl doesn’t blow through every single skilled winger he comes into contact with, at will.

Keep in mind that in this game, at 5v5, Nylander was hard matched to Draisaitl’s line and completely embarrassed them, not allowing them to get a single scoring chance.

Nope, better just to play the replay on a loop to try to reinforce the lame and incorrect idea that Nylander lacks effort or defensive acumen.  It was a low-class move and frankly, it should have embarrassed everyone working there that night.

William Nylander routinely puts up some of the best transition numbers in the NHL.  For years he’s been one of the single best scoring chance creators in the game.

The garbage, biased, conspiracy-level coverage of this player is really just ego driven non-sense from a bunch of old Hockey Men  who seem to have Nylander as an avatar for the advanced stats movement and their gradual decline into irrelevance.

They seem to think that Nylander – who puts up the stats of a superstar despite a weirdly consorted effort to pretend he doesn’t – must be constantly denigrated because if he is good then they were wrong  (about stats, about how to measure the game, how to watch the game, and how to build a team).

As recently as this week someone went on TV and said that a player who had eight points in nine games, while putting up the best stats profile on the team “desperately needed that goal” in a way that implied there was some kind of pressure on him to prove he’s a good player, despite routinely putting up similar or better 5v5 stats than a guy who makes four million dollars more than he does.

Nylander leads the Toronto Maple Leafs with a 55% expected goals rating, he has a 59% puck possession rating (bonkers).  The Leafs get 55% of the total shots when he’s on the ice (team leader) and 60% of the scoring chances.

He’s almost a point per game without being on the first power-play.  He is second on the team in 5v5 points with 4 despite playing almost 100% of his time with a guy who has a zero percent shooting percentage.

Marner has the point totals, but Nylander has been the Leafs best and most consistent player and is their MVP through the first nine games.