The Toronto Maple Leafs are 7-2-1 which puts is such a strong start that even an established great team would have trouble keeping it up.
If the Toronto Maple Leafs were to keep up this pace, they’d be something approaching the best team of all time (Seventh best). I think the Leafs are good, but maybe not quite that good? Anything is possible, however, and it’s going to be fun to find out.
On one hand, the Leafs have played a one-goal game in every single game (if you include empty net goals) and no matter who you are, you only have about a fifty-fifty chance of winning a one-goal game. Therefore the Leafs have been lucky.
They aren’t quite in the top ten yet for shooting percentage and save percentage, but those numbers are trending up and their PDO is now over one – which suggests that they have been lucky as well.
On the other hand, Auston Matthews is still shooting about 1/3 below his career average 5v5 and is due to pick it up. Freddie Andersen is still below .900 which means he’s due to get better as well.
In the end, there is a lot of reason to believe this team can play better (not that they’ve played badly) which bodes well for their future. I don’t think they quite “deserve” their record right now, but I really like the fact that they are winning while clearly having another level or two to improve.
A lot of that comes from the “Big Four” so let’s dig in and see how each has performed so far this year. Note that all stats for this article are 5v5 unless otherwise noted and that I got all the numbers from naturalstattrick.com.
Note also that this article was written ahead of last night’s game and does not include stats from that game.