Toronto Maple Leafs: The Sheldon Keefe Era Is All But Over

The Toronto Maple Leafs have lost to three of the NHL’s worst teams and they’ve only played eight games so far.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a 4-3-1 record, and would deserve criticism for anything less than a 7-1 mark, given the preposterously easy schedule they started with.

So burn your jerseys.

Hate your idols.

Cry in your Doritos, then eat the soggy chips with shame, while you talk about how much you hate what you think William Nylander is an avatar for.

Then pop onto your old favorite website and rage out for an hour, ignoring all the positives while pretending that anyone who disagrees with you must not have watched the same game.

Who knows? Maybe you were right all along.

The Toronto Maple Leafs Let Down Their Coach

The starting goalie played one game. This isn’t really too big of a deal, since Ilya Samsonov has been great, but it still means Erik Kallgren has played twice.  (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

Timothy Liljegren hasn’t played yet. 

Auston Matthews has 1 5v5 goal, and it was a tip in.  He is yet to shoot the puck into the net during 5v5, even though he is the NHL’s best 5v5 scorer by a mile.

Morgan Rielly and T J Brodie, neither of whom has lost their minutes in five and six season (respectively) have been destroyed to the tune of 9-5 (Rielly) and 8-3 (Brodie) so far, despite winning their minutes based on their actual play.  For example, with Rielly on the ice this year, the Leafs get 55% of the dangerous chances, and are expected to score 53% of the goals.

For the season,  the Leafs, with Tavares or Matthews on the ice this year, are shooting just 5% which is very, very low.  About half of what you can expect.

That is true, but they still aren’t looking like a top team.  Sure, they are talented, but they could likely sleepwalk to a better record than they currently have.

After the first eight games of the season, the results have been extremely bad.  Other than Ilya Samsonov, it’s hard to think of one player who is even worth caring about right now.

The team has the 22nd lowest PDO in the NHL, and they played Kalgren twice, Matthews has 1 5v5 goal while Kampf has 3, their top pairing is getting much worse results than they deserve, and normally their ability to score would have won them a few of the games they lost.

But still, maybe this is the record they deserve.  

When they have amazing numbers and get hosed by the refs, I’ll be the first one to say so. 

But their numbers right now are not significantly better than their record.

Yes Matthews should score more, but hasn’t the problem always been that when Matthews doesn’t score, this team loses?  I’m sure that’s true for most teams and their stars,

Why don’t they switch up their lines in a real way, instead of swapping Kerfoot and Bunting?

If the Leafs dominate and lose, I will be the first one to tell the whiners to shut up and stop being so emotional.  But I kind of agree with Steve’s earlier, and slightly unhinged post.

This team is playing like they bought into the “Who Cares About the Regular Season?” the fanbase was trying to pretend it could keep up for six months (in reality, they couldn’t last a full game vs Montreal).

Any team with Matthews and Marner can win a lot of games they don’t show up for….but outside of that top line, the rest of the team’s stats for the year are putrid. It’s not like in the playoffs the last three years when they dominated and got unlucky. There are some whacky anomalies, but even with a few lucky bounces, this team needs something and I don’t know what it is.

In the NHL that almost always means just one thing:

Sheldon, it was a nice run buddy. You don’t deserve to be fired, you will, like Phil Kessel before you, find much success elsewhere.   it’s not your fault, but someone has to take the blame and a team like this doesn’t really have any other Big Change options.

The only question the Toronto Maple Leafs have to ask now is how does Mr. Trotz take his coffee?