Toronto Maple Leafs In a Great Position at the All-Star Break

The Toronto Maple Leafs are sitting pretty at the all-star break.

There are always going to be annoying cry-babies who pine for whatever it is they aren’t getting in the moment, but this is an awesome team in a great spot, and if you’re still whining about the Toronto Maple Leafs and Kyle Dubas after five years, how have you not picked out a new favorite team?

For those of us who can recognize greatness, this has been a fantastic era of hockey.   Every single night you get to watch three of the best players in the entire world, not to mention John Tavares and Morgan Rielly.

Other than a conspicuous lack of playoff success, this is the most entertaining and sustained period of excellence in post-expansion team history.

Toronto Maple Leafs at the All-Star Break

The Leafs enter the break 3rd overall and 5th by points-percentage, 4th by expected-goals percentage.  Hilariously, the NHL’s top five teams are all in the East, and three of the top five are in the Atlantic.

No matter, the Leafs, at this point, shouldn’t care who they play or under what circumstances.  They beat Tampa, still didn’t win.  They lost to Montreal.  You can’t get better or worse, so what’s it matter?

The Leafs are 5-4-1 in their last ten, which isn’t very good, but they’ve played fine.  Those ten games feature two of their worst losses (to Ottawa and Detroit) but also two of their best losses (two games to Boston it was absolutely criminal they didn’t get points in), and a fluky loss to the Habs in OT.

The margin between the 5-4-1 record and an 8-2 record doesn’t even exist.  The NHL is crazy – the Leafs play good enough to go 8-2 but only get 11 points instead of 16, meanwhile:

Tampa: 8-2

Boston: 7-2-1

Carolina 9-0-1

New Jersey  8-1-1

You couldn’t make that up.  It’s nuts to play out of your mind, get bad results, then see every team you’re competing with just absolutely crush it.  32-5-3 is the record for the teams the Leafs are competing with over the last ten games.

To put it another way, the four teams the Leafs are chasing/ competing with, just picked up  84% of the possible points over a combined half-season.  That is significantly better than the best team of alltime.

There is nothing you can do about this – these are good teams.  However, you can keep in mind that things tend to balance out.  Even if all four of those teams played well in all 40 of the games, they normally wouldn’t win much more than 63% of the points, and even that would be good.

An optimist would point out that the Leafs only fell to 5th during a time when their results failed to match their play, and their four main rivals were more than maxxing out their results.  If it takes that unusual of a circumstance to fall to 5th, you’ll likely finish higher once things even out.

So eventually, you have to assume as the season see-saws along, the Leafs will once again get hot while those other team’s get cold. It can be disheartening when they all get hot at once, but like I said, the Leafs are in really good position here. (stats naturalstattrick.com).

The Toronto Maple Leafs are clearly a top team, and they  have a ton of assets to convert to players to improve their team down the stretch.  This is their year, I feel it in my bones.