Toronto Maple Leafs: Eastern Conference Title Still In Sight

The Toronto Maple Leafs might have lost to Buffalo on Wednesday, but they weren’t the only top team losing to a dud team this week.

The Colorado Avalanche, the NHL’s best team by five points over the next best team, lost to the Phoenix Coyotes last night, for the second time in a row.  The Toronto Maple Leafs – who somehow lost a game to the Coytoes this year were they utterly destroyed them – can relate.

In fact, the Leafs rivals for the President’s Trophy – save Florida, who have their own  trouble – all lost last night.  Besides the Avalanche, the Lightning lost, and so did the Hurricanes.

While that definitely helps, nothing but time can take away the sting of losing to Buffalo.

Toronto Maple Leafs and the NHL Standings

With just three weeks to go before the NHL trade deadline, the Toronto Maple Leafs find themselves ten points out of first place overall, with one game in hand. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

The Avalanche may be running away with first place, but don’t overrate them – they play a much easier schedule that anyone in the Atlantic, which arguably holds four of the NHL’s five best teams.

The Avs have a 13  point lead over the Western Conference’s second best team, so their record is obviously padded quite a bit, especially when you consider that seven of the NHL’s eight best teams are in the Eastern Conference (depending on if you believe the Flames are for real, which I most certainly do not).

The Leafs – who’s .685 points-percentage puts them fifth overall, even though it would put them either first or second overall in all but three of the preceding ten NHL seasons.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are just three points back of FLA and two back of Tampa.  Their recent run of 5-4-1 is among their worst stretches of the season, but three of those wins came against Washington, Minnesota and Pittsburgh, and at least one of the losses (Van) would have been a win 99% of the time.

Always look on the bright side.

Speaking of which: the Toronto Maple Leafs are fifth overall, but have the fifth worst 5v5 save percentage in the NHL.  According to Tanner’s Law of Goaltending (and common sense) this bodes very well for their future, as teams that vastly outperform their goaltending tend to win a lot of games when their goaltending inevitably rebounds, which it always does.

Stop me if you heard this one before: The Toronto Maple Leafs are doing great, but everything we have to predict the future with says they’ll do even better as time goes on.  Great news if you’ve never seen the rightful owners of the Stanley Cup actually win it.   Which is most of us.  The Eastern Conference title is within site, and it’s going to be a great stretch run.