A Former Strength Is Now a Weakness for the Toronto Maple Leafs

Special teams have played a huge role in the success of the Toronto Maple Leafs for the past couple of seasons as both their power play and penalty kill have ranked in the upper echelon in the NHL during that time.

In particular, the Toronto Maple Leafs penalty kill was so effective that they often generated scoring chances while a man short, changing the notion of the penalty kill to more a “power kill” for the team.

Their success was fuelled by the presence of competent penalty killers such as Pierre Engvall, Ilya Mikheyev, Alexander Kerfoot, Noel Acciari, Ryan O’Reilly, Sam Lafferty and Justin Holl, along with the usual mainstays Mitch Marner and David Kampf.

However, with most of them now departed from the team, only Marner and Kampf remains from the aforementioned specialized group.

Now just ten games into the 2023-24 season, the Leafs are starting to feel the aftermath of the mass exodus of capable penalty killers.

A Former Strength Is Now a Weakness for the Toronto Maple Leafs

By being forced to deploy players such as superstar Auston Matthews and unproven commodities in Noah Gregor that haven’t been used primarily in a penalty kill role extensively in their NHL careers, the Leafs penalty kill has struggled mightily as a result to start the season.

They currently rank in the bottom third in the entire league with a success rate just close to 76%, having given up eight goals on 33 attempts.

More worrisome was the fact that they had given up a power play in four of their past six games, including multiple power play goals in two of them. (All stats from NHL.com)

We predicted earlier that this could be a potential problem for the Leafs this season, just that we didn’t expect it to come this early already.

Unless the Leafs suddenly acquire a player with penalty kill skills, or someone among their current novice penalty killers step up in a big way, this could be a trend that may linger on further into the season.

At the same time, it may potentially become their Achilles’ heel as the season progresses as they could end up playing less aggressively with the fear that if they incur a penalty, they could get scored on easily as a result.

The Leafs will definitely need to find a remedy for this soon before they start finding themselves in the loss column more often than not, because trying to constantly outscore the opponent all the time to make up for it will eventually catch up to them.