Toronto Maple Leafs: T.J Brodie Back Is Back and Will Play Tonight
The Toronto Maple Leafs received some excellent news today when it was announced that T.J Brodie would return from the I.R for tonight’s game against the L.A Kings.
Brodie hasn’t played since the November 11th game where the Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Pittsburgh Penguins 4-2.
That was the last time the Leafs lost a game in regulation.
The Leafs went 9-0-3 without one of their best defensemen.
So maybe it’s not that great of news that he’s coming back!
The Toronto Maple Leafs Get Brodie Back
I kid.
The results were excellent while he was out, and the Leafs are well overdue for a loss, so they might even go down against LA tomorrow night, which will look horrible for Brodie.
But it will only look that way.
The results of any hockey game border on random, and Brodie is clearly a key part to the Toronto Maple Leafs and their fortunes this year. The fact that the Leafs didn’t lose when he was gone does not mean they are better without him – it’s a meaningless coincidence.
52% Corsi
52% Shots-For
53% X-Goals
54% Scoring Chances
55% High-Danger Scoring Chances (all stats naturalstattrick.com).
As you can see, the Toronto Maple Leafs win the minutes he is on the ice quite easily.
Even better: with the emergence of Timothy Liljegren and Rasmus Sandin, he won’t have to step right into extremely tough minutes once he’s back.
The difficulty for Sheldon Keefe will be in not reverting back to old habits. Brodie is a good player, maybe even one of the NHL’s most underrated performers (since he’s solid, nearly always, but doesn’t score much, he gets underrated) but now that Keefe knows that Liljegren and Sandin’s amazing numbers from last season were not flukes, and not due to easy minutes, then he can deploy his blue-liners with a much better balance.
And the Leafs will be better for it.
In fact, the sooner the Leafs transition Brodie into a second-pairing player, while leaving the heavy lifting to the kids, the better their team will be.
It’s excellent that Brodie is coming back, but it might turn out that his getting injured was the best long-term thing for this team. Liljegren and Sandin at the top of the lineup was something the Leafs needed, and something they likely wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.
Brodie is the only Leafs defenseman who has a goals-for percentage under 50%. The Leafs didn’t lose once while he was out. These things are probably coincidences, but it’s still good to know that Brodie isn’t as important to the team as people thought.
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It opens up a lot of options, both in deployment and future roster management.