7 Reasons Why the Toronto Maple Leafs Are In Big Trouble

Here Is Why the Toronto Maple Leafs Are In Big Trouble

1. The Blue-Line. 

A little known fact is that Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are posting MVP-type numbers when Morgan Rielly is on the ice, and they are posting career worst numbers when he’s not. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

This is because the rest of the Toronto Maple Leafs blue-line is horrendous, outside of the injured Liljegren and the apparently ageless Rielly.

The Leafs entered the season with five out of six players being over 30, and without any kind of depth or physical presence whatsoever. I talked about this a lot, but most of the media was stuck on the fact that they were returning most of the same guys who’d been very successful in the past.

Timothy Liljegren is injured long-term, which hurts because he’s the only good player they have outside of Rielly.

McCabe, Giordano and Brodie are all declining before our eyes and all of them play too high up in the lineup.

While the Leafs should be able to outscore much of their problems, when the blue-line can’t move the puck well enough for Matthews and Marner to succeed, the problem might be bigger than it appears.

Basically through injury or decline, the entire blue-line is imploding.

And one more thing about the blue-line – it’s not the injuries.  A healthy blue-line of Rielly/Brodie McCabe/Liljegren Giordano/Klingberg still very much sucks.

With Liljegren out, the Leafs have one above average NHL defenseman, and that is ridiculous.

2. Regulation Wins

Only Montreal has less, with four. The Leafs have five.  They are tied for second last in the NHL with San Jose, Seattle and a bunch of other bad teams.

Winning in regulation isn’t a guarantee of future success, but it definitely is an indication of how well you’re playing.  The Leafs have six wins in OT or Shootout, but once you get beyond regulation, you might as well flip a coin.

The Leafs are 11th overall in total points, but could easily be 25th if they had gotten relatively unlucky in overtime.

3. Expected Goals

The Toronto Maple Leafs are 20th in Expected Goals Percentage, which is the best statistic we have for forecasting the immediate future.

The Leafs are 11th overall, but 20th in Expected Goals, so they are expected to move closer to 20th overall as time goes on.

With their blue-line sapping the skill of Matthews/Marner, and their goalies playing sub-par, it’s not likely they can keep out performing their play.

The Leafs are also under 50% in puck-possession, shots, goals, scoring chances and dangerous scoring chances at 5v5.  That is not a recipe for long-term success.

4.  Roster Building

The Toronto Maple Leafs roster doesn’t really make sense.

Max Domi is is not good enough to play on the first line.  Nylander and Tavares are too poor defensively to play Domi with him.

That leaves the third line, but you can’t build any kind of shut-down line with Max Domi on it, which means you can’t play David Kampf on the third line.

Kampf shouldn’t be on a third line, because he doesn’t score, but at least you could build a defensive shut-down line with him on it and make due.  Max Domi prevents that.

So with Domi and Kampf on the same team, you have a situation where one of them needs to be an extremely expensive fourth line piece.

It makes roster building impossible, especially if you have Ryan Reaves on the fourth line, ruining any good that Kampf does.

It’s not so much the individual players as their mix.

Having spent over $5 million dollars on two bottom six players who are one-dimensional in opposite ways means it’s extremely hard for Sheldon keefe to build a workable lineup.

It’s hard to look at the Leafs roster and then think it was a good idea to change GMs five minutes before the off-season started.  Treliving had to get caught up on the fly, and it shows.

I hope he’s a better general manager than he’s showed so far, because I’d fire him right now without a second thought.  To date, he’s about as good a GM as John Ferguson Jr, which I think might be honestly be unfair to old JFJ.

5. The First Line

I’ve already talked about how Matthews and Marner do as well as ever when they are on the ice with Morgan Rielly, and clearly the Leafs can’t go one with just a single above average defenseman on their team, but there is another problem.

Michael Bunting. 

The Toronto Maple Leafs clearly miss him more than any player they lost last summer.  It’s not just that he put up superstar numbers at 5v5 with Matthews and Marner, but that he did it for $900K.

I like Matthew Knies but he just not be ready for prime time.  Then again, he might be, if the first line problems are exclusively due to having no good D after Rielly.  At this point, the jury is out, but it clearly wouldn’t hurt to have a more experienced top line player.

6.  Third Line Centre

Max Domi is alright.

But, historically, teams with 3 x numer-one centres down the middle are unbeatable.  If you don’t have a great third line, you need a supreme blue-line to compensate.

The Leafs, you might be aware, are oh-for-two in that department right now.

If everything else is clicking, you can get along without a great 3C, but Max Domi is clearly not the answer here.

It’s only #6 on their biggest problems list, but it’s still a problem.

7. Ryan Reaves

He’s fast becoming the worst player in Toronto Maple Leafs history. I know it’s embarrassing that they have to cut a player they just gave a three-year contract to, but the stupidity of this deal was apparent the second it was signed.

Ryan Reaves is not an NHL player anymore, and every day he spends here is just an indictment of the GM because it’s OK to make mistakes, but it’s not OK to ignore them and not correct them.

In conclusion, the Toronto Maple Leafs have a roster problem – the blue line – and the repercussions from having such a bad blue-line are that the two best indicators of future success are currently very bad.

There is a whole host of other problems, but the main one is the blue-line.

The good news here is that they have assets and cap space (or at least flexibility) and should be able to fix the problem before things go too far south.