Toronto Maple Leafs: Brutal Start for Rival Makes Things Clear

The Toronto Maple Leafs have started the season off very well.

Two wins, an overtime loss to a team they badly outplayed, and another loss where the Toronto Maple Leafs put 47 shots on net.  It’s not a perfect start, but it’s encouraging.

The pressure is on for the Leafs this season, after they famously collapsed against the Montreal Canadiens in last year’s playoffs, which made it five straight seasons of the Auston Matthews Era without anything to show for it in the playoffs.

However, the pressure is only the next stage in being a competitive team.  Neither the Colorado Avalanche nor the Tampa Bay Lightning were competing for cups in the first five years of their current core player’s careers either.

The Leafs may have lost to Montreal, but the Habs are currently doing their best to put that playoff series in context in a way that even the best intentioned Leafs fan has been unable to do. 

Montreal’s Start Puts Toronto Maple Leafs Series in Context

Even as statistical analysis, gambling and access to information continually make today’s sports fan far more sophisticated , we are still in the dark ages as far as mainstream narratives go.

If a team flukes their way to the Finals, as Montreal did, the predominant coverage and analysis is still treats victorious underdogs as if they are superior to their luck-vanquished foes.

It was clear to anyone unbiased person that regardless of the outcome of last season’s playoffs, that the Leafs roster was superior  to Montréal’s, that they were more of a legitimate Cup Contender this season, despite the results, and that their future was brighter.

You just wouldn’t know it from the NHL’s day to day coverage.

But Montreal’s start is doing a better job than all the statistics in the world could do.

The Habs are 0-5, and all but eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs before the end of October.  If you estimate that it would take 96 points to get the Wild Card, the Habs would need to post a 48-29 record the rest of the way.  That seems like a tall order for a team that is 0-5.

No doubt Montreal has been unlucky (they are over 50% puck possession, and their shooting under 3% as a team 5v5) but they’ve also played to a 46% expected goals rating, so it’s not like they’re deserving a whole lot better.

The point here is that results in the NHL are mercurial. They don’t really tell us much.  Take away the last five games, and the Canadiens are a young team who just went to the Finals, and one with an extremely bright future.

They are still a young team with a bright future.  They were never as good as most teams who go as far as they went, and they aren’t as bad as most teams who start 0-5.

The Leafs lost a playoff series where Auston Matthews couldn’t shoot the puck (he had one goal in seven games) and where John  Tavares didn’t play, and Jake Muzzin missed game seven.  And as much as that sucks, if you look a the Canadians (lose in the Cup Final, then suddenly become the worst team in hockey) you can see how wacky results in the NHL are.

I think if we look at the Canadien’s finish to last season, and compare it to their start to this one, it can illuminate how random the results can be in an professional league with a salary cap. Knowing that, we should perhaps be more forgiving of the bad luck the Leafs have encountered so far in their quest to finally end their 56 year streak of futility.