Toronto Maple Leafs: Trying to Make Sense of the Last Seven Games

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been winning while playing poorly, and they will hopefully use the next couple of weeks to get back to the kind of consistency they haven’t shown since the trade deadline.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have statistically been one of the worst teams in the league over the last 12 or so games.

Yes, they’ve been working new players into the lineup and the coach has been experimenting, but it’s still not ideal to have to outscore your troubles and rely on your goalie to bail out your bad play.

Since March 3rd, the Leafs are 12th in points-percentage, but still picking up .640% of their points, which is great.   The problem with this is that results in the short-term have no predictive abilities while larger samples that contribute to Expected Goals do.

Toronto Maple Leafs: Trying to Make Sense of the Last Seven Games

The Leafs are in last place in expected goals since the trade deadline. (stats naturalstattrick.com).

Last place.  In the best predictive stat that we have.

Their main problem? High Danger shot-attempts. They have 55, their opponents have 86.

Most people will only look at the results – which have been good.  Unfortunately, they are shooting over ten percent while stopping almost 93% of the shots against them.

To be sure, these are only 1 percentage point rises in production,  but given the margins for success in the NHL that is more significant than it might seem.  Only 2 teams are above 10% shooting on the year, and goalies aren’t going to maintain 93% save-percentages over the longterm.

In addition to the Leafs high percentages, Auston Matthews is winning his minutes 10-2 in the last seven games.  That is great, but it also hides a lot of flaws and no one is going to win 80% of their minutes long-term.

Besides Matthews and Jarnkrok, not a single Leafs player is above 50% Expected Goals in the last seven games.

I don’t think the Leafs suck, and I am not cheering against them.  Simply pointing out that despite good results their play is less than ideal.

How worried should we be? It is hard to say.  Is the team going to overuse Luke Schenn and Sam Lafferty?  As long as those players are confined to the bottom of the lineup, it shouldn’t matter.  Is the coach going to play Timothy Liljegren or is he going to sit him out?  That actually probably matters a lot more.

Ryan O’Reilly will be back soon, and the coach will likely stop experimenting so much.  That will help.