Toronto Maple Leafs: Erik Kallgren Has Saved the Season

The Toronto Maple Leafs defeated the woeful Vancouver Canucks Saturday night.

The game winner was scored by Jordie Benn, which is what the Toronto Maple Leafs expected when they inserted him into the lineup for his debut with the team.

Benn was signed as insurance in the summer and started somewhere around ninth or tenth on the depth chart, depending on your views of Carl Dahlstrom and Victor Mete.  But injuries to Jake Muzzin, Dahlstrom and, last night, T.J Brodie, ushered him into the lineup, just shortly after recovering from an early season injury.

For Benn, it was his first goal since last January, and it puts him within 20% of matching his career high, one game into the season.  (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

Toronto Maple Leafs vs Vancouver Canucks

It was a  nice touch by Sheldon Keefe to start the game with all six of the Swedes the Leafs have on their team as a salute to icon Borje Salming.

This of course meant starting Erik Kalgren in the second game of a back to back. Statistically, NHL goalies do much worse in game two when starting both games.

Still, with Matt Murray unable to go, the Leafs didn’t want to risk the weekend on the Untested Keith Petruzzelli.

It was a choice I thought was wrong, but it worked out.

With Matt Murray, Ilya Samsonov and Joseph Woll all down with injury, the Leafs turned to EriK Kallgren, who had a career save percentage under .900, and still does.

He has saved the season.

The Leafs are 3-2-3 in games he has played in (Ilya got one of those wins, but Kallgren played the third period cold and held on), which is fantastic when you consider he’s be their fourth choice if everyone was healthy.Kallgren’s great play has been hidden by three things: the Leafs haven’t scored much when he’s been in net, they lost three times in overtime, and the penalty kill has been horrible when he plays.

Still, you can’t blame the goalie for the PK, and his sub-.800 numbers are not a function of his performance.,

What is, is 5v5 play, where he has been astounding.

Erik Kallgren has a save percentage of 93.13% which is an incredible number, virtually identical to what Ilya Samsonov has done.

If only the Leafs games where Kallgren counted towards their team stats, they’d be 5th in save-percentage overall.  (They are 8th overall thanks to that one game where they dressed Matt Murray).

The reason no one has noticed how great Kallgren has been is the PK, and the overtime record (not in any way his fault) but mostly it’s the scoring.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have finished 3rd in 5v5 goals-per-minute for the last two seasons.  With Kallgren in net, they are 28th in the NHL this season.

The Toronto Maple Leafs may have found their future starter.  At this point, whatever happens with Matt Murray, he’s suddenly got two people competing for their job.

Erik Kallgren’s performance has been star-level over this season so far.  I realize it’s hard to isolate the PK from the rest of the game in terms of perception, but the fact is, any team that gets 93% 5v5 goaltending for any length of time is going to win most of their games.

What happens on the penalty kill is as much about the other team and about luck as it is anything else.

Overtime with 3v3 is a total coin-flip, so by doing nothing differently, Kallgren’s record could be 5-2 with one dramatic save thrown in for good measure.  If that was the case, we’d be celebrating his fantastic, out-of-nowhere ascendancy to the top of the hockey world.

And that isn’t even accounting for the unusually low 5v5 scoring the Leafs have done with him in net, or the weirdly horrible PK he has been the recipient of.

Basically, what I’m saying is all hail the new king.