7 Reasons Why the Toronto Maple Leafs Are In Big Trouble

The Toronto Maple Leafs entered the season as virtual locks to make the playoffs.

Outside of the small chance every team faces of just having a really unlucky season, the Toronto Maple Leafs looked good to go, even if their off-season wasn’t great.

The Leafs have four superstars, including two of the best players alive,  plus they have Morgan Rielly and Tyler Bertuzzi.

That alone should guarantee that they make the playoffs and are a Cup Contender, but unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case.

While Matthews has had a rough go since the Swedish trip, prior to that the team played a fifth of the season with 2 x MVP Candidates and their odds of making the playoffs – let alone being a cup contender – went way, way down since the start of the year.

Right now, the Leafs are only six points out of first place, with a game in hand.  They are only in 11th overall, despite having a horrible season to date.

The fact is, they are getting really, really lucky when it comes to results.

That can be a good or a bad thing.

If they recognize their problems and address them right away, then the fact they got lucky while struggling will be a huge factor in their eventual success and will undoubtable be a good thing.

If, as is the tendency of almost all sports teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs take too much of an optimistic approach about their good luck and believe it’s real, refuse to address the problems proactively and wait until things fall apart in a way that is no longer deniable, that’s a huge problem.

If you heard Brad Treliving talk about Ryan Reaves this week, then you probably, as I do, suspect the Leafs are going to take the latter approach.

That’s not a good thing.

Here’s why:

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.