Toronto Maple Leafs: Mitch Marner Is Hart Trophy Co-Favorite

The Toronto Maple Leafs currently lead the NHL standings and could possibly be icing the best team in franchise history.

Not only do the Toronto Maple Leafs lead the NHL, they also have the odds on Hart Trophy favorite on their roster in Auston Matthews, whose currently scoring at a goal-per-game pace and making goalies across the country look extremely stupid.

But Matthews isn’t the only Hart Trophy contender on the team.  Mitch Marner is having almost as good of a season.

While some people will still incredibly complain about his contract, the fact is that Mitch Marner is worth every single penny, and probably quite a bit more.  The season he is having would likely be the best one in Leafs history if not for the fact that Matthews is even better.

Toronto Maple Leafs and Mitch Marner

So far there have only been four games all year where Marner didn’t get at least one point, and he’s in third place with 27 points in the NHL scoring race.

That doesn’t really tell the whole story though.

Marner leads the NHL in 5v5 scoring, something far harder and more important than leading in PP scoring.  Marner has four more points than Connor McDavid in less ice time.  (stats naturalstatrick.com). 

Even crazier, his 3.68 points per 60 minutes of ice-time are a full point per game more than McDavid, and he and Matthews lead the league in this category by a mile.

The craziest thing of all is that the Toronto Maple Leafs are currently winning 24-8 when Marner is on the ice. That’s good for a 75% share of the total goals.  It is an insane number this far into the season.

And as awesome as that is, there is a reason that people use expected goals and corsi to evaluate players as well.  Marner is getting 75% of the goals, but his expected goal rating is only 53%, which, while good, suggest that Marner is getting a bit lucky, which, given his dominance lately, should go without saying.

But you’ve got to be good to be lucky, and Marner and Matthews are definitely capable of scoring at a higher rate than average.  That said, they probably aren’t going to collectively shoot 17% for the entire year, and their goalie isn’t going to stop 94% of the shots for much longer.

If you look at all the stats you can come to the same conclusion you would just using common sense: anyone scoring almost 4 points per 60 is on a huge bender and will inevitably come down, but “coming down” in this sense doesn’t mean anything bad, it just means that the norm is probably closer to a 100 point pace than the 130 point pace he’s currently on.

Mitch Marner is scoring a point and a half per game right now, and he’s trying to become the first Toronto Maple Leafs player in modern post-expansion history to lead the NHL in scoring.  He’s currently the #2 challenger for the Hart Trophy, but the cool thing is that #1 is also a Leaf.