How close are the Toronto Maple Leafs to being able to win the Atlantic?

The Toronto Maple Leafs main goal is to win the Stanley Cup.

Unfortunately, that is next to impossible unless they win the Atlantic Division, and so, their more immediate goal is to win their division. The Toronto Maple Leafs play in the NHL's toughest division, and not only is there the reigning Stanley Cup Champion Florida Panthers to compete with, but Tampa, Boston, Buffalo, Ottawa, and Detroit make seven plausible playoff teams in a single division.

Beyond that, if the Leafs don't win the division, they will have to play one of the best teams in the NHL in the first round, and follow that up by playing the Cup Champs (most likely, although nothing is guaranteed).

As we've seen for the last decade, unless you win the division your hopes of moving on are very, very low. So how do the Leafs sit in comparison to their goal of winning the Atlantic? (standings nhl.com, stats naturalstattrick.com).

Are the Toronto Maple Leafs going to be able to win the Atlantic Division?

Right now the Leafs are in decent shape. They have played 19 games, about a quarter of the schedule, and are sitting just one point back of Florida for first.

The Panthers, however, have a game in hand. The Leafs .632 points-percentage is good for 8th overall, and second in the division.

The Lightning have three games in hand, and if they won them all they would be ahead of the Leafs. The fourth place Bruins are just .500 however, and Ottawa is tied with them. The Leafs might seem way ahead, but if the Senators won their games in hand, they'd be just three poins behidn the Leafs.

If you look at it in baseball terms (the MLB way is best) the Leafs are a half-game behind the Panthers, but only 4.5 games up on the Montreal Canadiens who reside in the basement. The Leafs have only lost three games in a row once this season, but a four game losing streak - which isn't unheard of - could see them hanging out with the Canadiens faster than you'd think possible.

Results can be random, especially so early, but the underlying numbers should give us a better idea: the Leafs are 8th overall but 14th by Expected Goals Percentage, while the Panthers are 6th overall and 8th by Expected Goals. The further your overall record is from your xGoals ranking, the luckier you are getting and the less sustainable your record.

The Leafs are 5th in 5v5 save-percentage, the Panthers are 21st. The Leafs goaltending will get worse, for sure. The Panthers is highly likely to get better. Way better. The fact that they already have a better record before the goalending regresses to the norm, is bad news for the Leafs.

Finally, we turn to PDO - which is the combined total of shooting and save percentage at 5v5. This measures luck because over time, every team will revert to a combined PDO of 100. Therefore, anyone over 100 is getting lucky and anyone under 100 is getting unlucky.

The Leafs PDO is 7th overall, 1.018, while the Panthers is 14th overall at 1.006. The Panthers at 6th overall, are out-performing their PDO. The Leafs, at 8th, are not. Both teams are overall getting slightly lucky, but the Panthers are making the most of it. The Leafs are likely to get worse luck as time goes on, meaning that they haven't picked up enough points while they were lucky.

From all this we can infer that the Panthers record is more "real" than the Leafs. All things being equal, the Panthers are likely to get better or stay the same, while the Leafs record is a bit of a mirage.

The good news? All things are not equal. The Leafs power-play will get better. They will get more goals from Auston Matthews. Their goaltending won't be this good forever, but those two aforementioned things should compensate.

But if I was a betting man, I'd be adding to this lineup because, as is, it's pretty clear that it isn't as good as what Florida has to offer, which means that winning the Atlantic Division is, while not impossible, very unlikely at the moment.