Who Is the Most Underrated Member of the Toronto Maple Leafs of All-Time?
The Toronto Maple Leafs have a lot of overrated players, but who is their most underrated, ever?
The Toronto Maple Leafs have had many overrated players.
Remember Nicholai Borshevsky? Lonny Bohonos? Peter Ing? Brandon Convroy? Aki "Ice" Berg? The Toronto Maple Leafs have had so many overhyped players turn out to nothing over the years.
They've also had a ton of guys like Tie Domi, Darcy Tucker or Roman Polak who were extremely overrated by a fanbase that loves to hype up the grinders.
But what about the opposite? What about players who are underrated?
Who Is the Most Underrated Member of the Toronto Maple Leafs of All-Time?
The Leafs faithful have somehow turned on Mitch Marner and turned him into an underrated player of sorts, so this got me thinking about who the most underrated player in team history was.
It turns out that I didn't have to think for long.
Who Is the Most Underrated Member of the Toronto Maple Leafs of All-Time?
It's incredibly obvious who takes this prize:
Jake Gardiner could skate like the wind and make plays that are only made by future hall of fame superstars, and yet he was never that kind of player.
He just had the ability to sometimes make you think he could be.
If he could stop his penchant for glaring errors. Usually at the worst time.
However, those errors weren't as bad as they seemed. Confirmation bias is what did Jake Gardiner's reputation in.
Yes, he would occasionally make huge mistakes, but he took big risks to get huge rewards, and his overall numbers were great.
The Leafs won, and deserved to win, Jake Gardiner's minutes, pretty much all of the time.
But those mistakes would end up plastered all over TV and social media right when that was becoming a thing.
Never before could you send around a player's embarrassing mistakes with such speed and convienance and Jake Gardiner was hurt by it worse than most.
You just remembered the mistakes and didn't notice that for the rest of the game, the ice was tilted in the Leafs favor when he was on the ice.,
Despite playing through a tank and a rebuild in his eight seasons with the Leafs, Gardiner's Goals-For numbers only dipped below 50% twice, and those were years in which the Leafs were truly awful and drafted Marner and Matthews afterwards.
That means that the Leafs won Gardiner's minutes in six of eight seasons. In total, the Leafs were +40 at 5v5 with Gardiner on the ice for all-time. (naturalstattrick.com).
It wasn't just luck either, in the four seasons he played after the Leafs were no longer a garbage team that was losing more or less on purpose, he was a positive expected-goals player every time.
By every other standard other than "I remember this one highlight where he looked pretty bad" Jake Gardiner was an awesome player. He posted the statistics and on-ice results of a strong top-pairing defenseman (though in no way am I saying he was near the top of the league or calling him elite), and was technically a star player in a few of his best seasons.
manual
The fact that most Leafs fans probably disagree with that last paragraph just proves my point: Jake Gardiner is the most underrated Leafs player of all-time.