The Toronto Maple Leafs are the best kept secret in the NHL.
The Toronto Maple Leafs have the best roster, are the deepest team in the NHL, and have the most stars. Last season they had the Hart Trophy winner, were the team that outperformed their goaltending by the biggest margin, and finished fourth overall.
They enter this season with 2 x Hart Trophy candidates, a Hall of Famer looking to rebound (Tavares) a superstar primed for a breakout (Nylander) and potentially three young impact players looking to become regulars (Sandin, Liljegren, Robertson).
They should be the odds-on favorites and the team everyone is talking about enter the new season.
They aren’t even on the radar.
Even their own fans seem sick of them. Like I wrote the other day, the Toronto Maple Leafs are in the most unique situation I’ve ever seen a sports team be in. They are simultaneously great and horrible. Expectations are both massive and non-existent.
What gives?
Toronto Maple Leafs: Keep It Like a Secret
The Leafs are owned by the same people who write the paychecks of almost every major hockey analyst. This leads to bizarre attempts to downplay the Leafs status as a top team, to avoid looking pro-Leafs.
This is compounded by the fact that the Leafs (despite the narrative being fictitious) are the avatars of the Advanced Stats War and, now that it’s over (all good NHL teams use analytics, all today’s good analysts use them) there is a bitter faction that can’t get over how they were ignored by the Leafs who kept William Nylander (against their express wishes, dammit!) for all these years.
They hate Kyle Dubas, and when you add in the noise from the media guys trying to look like they aren’t pro-Leafs, it creates a an anti-Leafs faction that views everything through the lens of what they think Steve Simmonds thinks Lou Lamoriello might very well have done in any given situation, and are characterized by an absolute refusal to acknowledge reality.
Add in the 50 years of pre-Kyle Dubas failure and six straight seasons of failing to get beyond the first round, and the Leafs are not looked up on like any other team has been in the past who was a) young b) yet to reach their full potential c) stacked with talent d) statistically better than they seem e) playing in a league where results are nearly random and f) has a 60 goal scorer.
Mitch Marner would be the best player on every team in the league besides Edmonton and Colorado. He is not the best player on his current team. In a star-driven league like the NHL, that automatically makes them a top team.
If the Leafs just had those two guys, they’d be worth watching. You could put Marner and Matthews on any roster in the NHL and it is an instant contender (pending the random results of their goalie’s performances). (stats from naturalstattrick.com).
They might be coming off six seasons of first round disappointment, but I’d rather view it as they are coming off a great series against a top team where they got screwed.
Their stars are reaching their primes and they are about to contend for real now. The Toronto Maple Leafs roster, if it was in any other city with any other name, would be hailed as the best roster since the start of the cap era, it would be hailed as a great team that’s time to dominate has come.
The NHL media just sucks at prognostication.
I don’t. This is the Leafs year. Their roster has the mkost stars, best combo of skill and defense, best mix of established stars and up and coming stars, and deepest team. Sure, the goalies are not reliable, but only five or so teams have reliable goalies, and two of them (Winnipeg and Long Island) probably won’t even make the playoffs.