Are the Toronto Maple Leafs That Won 11 of 13 Games For Real?

The Toronto maple Leafs beat the New York Islanders last night.

With the victory, the Toronto Maple Leafs won for the 11th time in their last 13 games.

The team is very fun to watch and cheer for right now, but long suffering Leafs fans can be excused if they don’t completely buy-in or believe in this team yet.

After all, it’s been over 50 years since the team won the Stanley Cup, and they literally have players in their organization born too soon to remember the last time they won a playoff series.

So, are the Leafs, who are climbing up the standings and threatening to compete for the President’s Trophy, for real?

Are the Toronto Maple Leafs As Good As They Seem?

Full disclosure: No team is as good as the Leafs have been over the last three weeks.

11-2 is a nice record, but with parity, a salary cap  and goalies, winning at the pro level is often predicated on luck.  Any team who is 11-2 is over-achieving, at least a little. That means that we are here today to establish whether the Leafs are a top-of-the-standings team and whether they’ll continue to win 80% of the time.  (stats from Naturalstattrick.com).

Even for good teams it has been established that one-goal games are a pretty close to a coin-flip.  The Leafs are 7-2 in those games, and so they should regress in these situations as well.

Jack Campbell currently has a 1.66 GAA and a .944 save percentage.  Those will go down.

The Leafs current penalty-kill is 88.7% which is too good and will go down.

All of this may not paint a pretty picture, but there is good news to balance it out.

The Leafs power-play is currently scoring 23% of the time, which should be maintainable.

Despite some stellar play from Cambell, the Leafs 5v5 save percentage as a team is only ranked 10th overall, so while Campbell won’t be as amazing as he has been, the back-ups should be better and, long term, as long as Campbell stays pretty consistent, a little regression shouldn’t hurt because…

The Toronto Maple Leafs are ranked 27th  in total 5v5 goals per minute, despite being – by far – the NHL’s best team at creating offense.  The Leafs lead the NHL in Expected-Goals percentage, and Expected-Goals per minute.

Furthermore, they are ranked first with 589 5v5 scoring chances.  Florida is ranked second with 472.  That is 117 more scoring chances than the next best team at creating them.  Per 60 minutes of 5v5 ice time, the Leafs average more than two scoring chances more than the next best team.

If we look at high-danger chances, the Leafs still rank first – getting 27 more dangerous scoring chances than Vegas, the second best team.

The Leafs are one of only two teams in the NHL shooting under 6% 5v5.  Think of how crazy that is when you consider the fact that they have three of the best goal scorers in the world on their roster.  The team is getting the chances and if you look at a three-year sample of every NHL team’s 208 (ish) games, there isn’t a single team who shot under 6% once the sample size got big enough.

That means it is 100% guaranteed to rise.  Auston Matthews has 2 5v5 goals, 10th on the Leafs. His correction to the norm should help offset any of the things like Jack Campbell and the Penalty Killing Unit’s inevitable declines.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are definitely for real, and if they maintain even 80% of what they’ve got going on now once Auston Matthews gets it going (or, more accurately, starts getting results that he has earned) they will be nearly unstoppable.