Toronto Maple Leafs: Early Returns on St. Louis Trade Looking Good
By James Tanner
The Toronto Maple Leafs added four significant additions to their team at the trade deadline.
In addition to Ryan O’Reilly, the Toronto Maple Leafs added Noel Acciari, Jake McCabe and Sam Lafferty.
They also added Luke Schenn, and for the record if Sheldon Keefe ever sits Timothy Liljegren in favor of him he should be instantly relieved of duty.
Today we are here to talk about the two additions from the Blues, and give a quick review of their Leafs careers so far, such as they are.
keep in mind that any conclusions drawn off the numbers so far will likely be wrong, due to the fact the team has only played a few games since the deadline and most of those games were crappy.
Toronto Maple Leafs Trade Deadline Early Returns From St. Louis
Ryan O’Reilly has five points and three goals in eight games. Unfortunately, if you take away his four point game, he has just one point in seven games. Plus he broke his finger.
However, the Leafs crush his minutes, he is above water in every important on-ice category and the Leafs are getting 60% of the scoring chances when he plays, along with an expected-goals rating of 52.35%.
Ignore the wacky points distribution, it’s been just eight games. It’s not his fault Auston Matthews shot a puck at him. He’s been solid to great.
Noel Acciari isn’t playing as big of a role, but he has been excellent himself.
Playing mostly with Zach Aston-Reese and Alexander Kerfoot (and occasionally with David Kampf) Acciari has been extremely successful so far.
Though he has just a single goal and no other points, Acciari has a 53% possession rating, and the Leafs have outshot the opposition 51 to 36 when he’s on the ice, good for 58% of the shots. They do even better when it comes to scoring chances (59%) and dangerous chances (63%). (stats naturalstattrick.com).
Though the Toronto Maple Leafs have tied his minutes so far, 2-2, this does not reflect his strong play at all, and that is because of it takes a lot longer to build up a sample size for goals than it does for other more frequent things like scoring chances or shot-attempts.
Though it’s obviously not good that Ryan O’Reilly is out for four to six weeks with a broken finger, Acciari is proving to be a great upgrade for the bottom of the lineup, and O’Reilly has at least shown that he can be a potential star-level player for this team.
dark. Next. Trade Deadline Options: What Could Have Been
The early returns for the Blackhawks trade haven’t been close to as good, but we’ll get to those tomorrow.