The bottom has completely fallen out of the Toronto Maple Leafs season.
The Toronto Maple Leafs lost to the Ottawa Senators on Saturday night. Worse, they looked like complete crap in doing so, in a game that should have been one of the most important games of the entire season.
If not for a shootout win in a game where they blew a three-goal lead, the Leafs would have lost their fifth game in a row last night.
And we are sitting here talking about the fact they don't have home-ice advantage in the playoffs and liikely won't win the division. But it could be worse - the Leafs played horribly coming out of the break but rattled off five victories in a row by winning twice in overtime and beating the Blackhawks, Rangers and a Rantanen-ravaged Hurricanes team, so if not for that, we could be talking about missing the playoffs entirely.
Only luck has prevented the Maple Leafs from an absolutely epic collapse
This little streak might have saved the season because the bad stats they posted while winning five in a row quickly blossemed into the losing streak they foreshadowed in the first place.
Since the break the Leafs are 29th in Corsi, 29th in shots-for, 31st in expected-goals percentage, and their formerly great goaltending is down to 24th from being a top-five ranking team before the break. (stats from naturalstattrick.com)
The Leafs also do not look good. They have taken one of the fastest and most exciting teams in the NHL and become the most boring dump-and-chase team in the league. Forget the fact that the Leafs are doing horribly, how is a team with this many superstars and this many exciting young players so boring to watch?
The Senators are only four points behind the Leafs. In baseball parlance that's only 2 games back. If not for the five game winning streak, the Leafs would be fighting with Montreal, Columbus, New York and others for the wildcard.
As it is now, the Leafs have a full ten point team on the Canadiens who are the 9th team, so I don't think we have to worry about missing the playoffs, but this team just does not look good. And the probably isn't just that it's a recent issue that we could write-off to Matthews being hurt or something like that.
The fact is, since the start of the season this team has looked off. Even when racking up points earlier in the year, they were posting bad numbers that said they should have lost more, but they had top goaltending. For much of the season, Anthony Stolarz has been the best goalie in the NHL - if he had played the entire season it's likely only Connor Hellebuyck would be better - and Joseph Woll has also been good.
This incredible goaltending has hidden many of the Leafs flaws - their inability to score at 5v5, their inability to drive play, or to dominate games.
Lately, the Leafs goaltending has fallen off and so the bottom seems to have completely fallen out of their season.