The Toronto Maple Leafs are not a perfect team by any stretch of the imagination. The Leafs are a contender, for sure, and they’ve got the pieces in place to compete for the next decade, but nothing is guaranteed.
The NHL is a salary cap league with near full parity, and on top of that, the playoffs are a tournament with short series that feature extremely high variance, and hockey itself is a game where a hot goalie can potentially dictate the outcome, regardless of what the other team does.
This is why there are no sure things in the Stanley Cup playoffs. You never know what can happen. The Toronto Maple Leafs outplayed the Blue Jackets last year in four of five games, yet they scored just ten goals in the entire five games series. They scored just three goals at 5v5 in the while shooting 1.97%, which means the Blue Jackets goalies stopped 98.03% of shots faced at 5v5 during the series.
The Leafs are one of the NHL’s highest scoring teams, and if their critics have anything to say about their roster, it is about toughness and defense, goaltending or special teams, but it is 0% about their ability to score. But weird things happen in small sample sizes. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).
Toronto Maple Leafs vs Small Sample Sizes
The other night in Montreal, the Leafs posted their fifth straight playoff game with a positive expected-goals rating. They scored just one 5v5 goal on Thursday, and now have four 5v5 goals in their last six playoff games.
They are 2-4 in these games, outplaying their opponents in five of them, and meanwhile they are losing despite a 5v5 save percentage of over .930 and zero power-play goals allowed.
Just so we are clear, I am going to repeat that: The Toronto Maple Leafs have played six playoff games in a row where their goalies saved over 93% of shots and they have perfect penalty killing, and yet, for some reason that defies explanation, they have lost four of these games.
The results suck and you don’t get points for trying, but you can base your frustration level about your team’s performance based on how they play, and the Leafs are playing like one of the best teams on earth. Overtime, if you keep playing well, the wins add up.
If you told me the Leafs would dominate puck possession, get great goaltending and perfect penalty killing, I’d expect them to win every time. Which, they normally would. This is just the fun of a small sample size – sometimes wacky things happen.
The Brightside is that these things self-correct. No team with Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and co. is going to shoot under 3% for very long. The Leafs were preposterously unlucky last year when they lost to Columbus, and on Thursday that trend continued.
Much like their power-play, the Maple Leafs playoff offense is bound to eventually live up to its potential. When that happens they will win games.