Toronto Maple Leafs: How the NHL’s Best Young Team Supposedly Failed

How the NHL’s Most Exciting Team Got a Bad Rep

First, the Toronto Maple Leafs decided to do things differently in a league that despises anything new or innovative.  The Leafs plan was to focus on skill, they’d revolutionize the way teams spent their salary cap money, and they’d eschew the brand of hockey that is the bread and butter of the majority of hockey fans over the age of 30.

In the strategy the Leafs employed – drafting smaller players, spending most of their money on stars, trading down in drafts, using analytics to make decisions, focusing on puck possession, not employing traditional “playoff types” – the Leafs questioned many fundamental assumptions about NHL hockey and how you should win at it. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with these ideas, but when you try something new and don’t succeed instantly, you’ve got to be prepared for backlash.

Tthe Leafs saw what bridge deals did to other teams cup windows and decided to pay everyone upfront before they “earned it.”  This went hand in hand with their plan to pay only for elite talent and take advantage of the fact that most mid-range NHL players were not any better than most of the players available every summer for near the league minimum.

Paying everyone before they “earned it” with playoff success turned off a lot of people, but would have been fine if not for the fact that this core group of players lost in five straight first round series. Now, context is everything….but sports narratives have no context.

The first three of the Leafs first-round failures occurred when the team was filled with rookies, sophomores and entry-level contracts.  They over-achieved early on and that made the subsequent failures look worse than they were.

People constantly look at only the point totals and tell me the Leafs have gotten worse over time. This isn’t true, because those point totals were highly inflated by career years by Freddie Andersen.  Either way, those first three playoff losses should have been seen as positives, considering the team just making the playoffs at that point in their development was good enough.

The series against Columbus sucked, but at the same time, the Blue Jackets set the NHL record for save percentage in a playoff series.  Two different goalies went on separate 50 save streaks in a five game series, while the team with the NHL’s best offense shot under 2% for the whole series at 5v5.

Also, it was a five game series after a six month layoff in the weirdest NHL season any of us will ever see.

This year, it was even worse when they lost to Montreal, but let’s talk about the amount of bad luck it took for that to happen.  First of all, in 17 games this year, Montreal beat the Leafs only four times in regulation.  In the playoffs, the Leafs had better goaltending, special  teams, 5v5 play, and also had the superior expected goals rating in every single game.

The Leafs became the first team to ever comeback from multiple two-goal deficits in the third period of the same series and lose both games in OT. In one of those games, during overtime, the Leafs outshot Montreal 12-1, and Montreal scored on a fluky knuckle puck from the blueline seconds after an uncalled headshot that should have resulted in a suspension.

Additionally, the Leafs played the entire series without John Tavares.  In sports there is a ridiculous narrative where “good teams overcome injuries” but that is clearly and objectively just not true, since studies show that the champion contender who is healthiest almost always wins in pro sports.

Fact is, a lot of people don’t understand how math works and actually think that it’s unlikely a team could get unlucky two years in a row.  It’s not.