The Toronto Maple Leafs have been off to a solid start for the 2024-25 NHL season. Despite owning just a 3-2-0 record, they have received strong performances from their offence, defense and goaltending as a whole.
In fact, if it wasn’t for some superb goaltending by the opposition during the Toronto Maple Leafs two losses, they could have been easily a perfect 5-0-0 to start the year, though no excuses are going to get the stink off of them after that Columbus game on Tuesday.
However, despite the strong play of the Maple Leafs in most aspects of their game, there is still one apparent glaring weakness that they need to seriously rectify, which is their play with the man advantage.
And they need to fix it before it's too late.
The Toronto Maple Leafs need to fix their one glaring weakness
For the past few seasons, the Maple Leafs power play actually consistently ranked among the upper echelon in the league.
During 2021-22, they were actually first overall with a 27.3% success rate. In 2022-23, they were second with a 26% success rate. Finally, just last season, the Leafs were still solid, ranked seventh with a 24% success rate. However, even with their success, their conversion rate had been gradually declining with each passing year.
More significantly, the Maple Leafs power play actually struggled mightily during the last couple of months of the 2023-24 regular season, as well as during their first round playoff series against the Boston Bruins. In fact, they were near the bottom of the league in that category during that time span.
Unfortunately, it appears as though those struggles have now carried over into the 2024-25 season. Despite having new personnel in assistant coach Marc Savard running and revamping the Leafs power play for this year, it has not paid dividends so far two weeks into the season.
After seven games this season, the Leafs are a pathetic 3 for 23 on the power-play, good for 26th in the league.
They have made a minor tweak in moving Oliver Ekman-Larsson onto the top power play unit. But other than that, the units have surprisingly remained more or less intact. The Leafs have been criticized for doing too much passing and making the pretty plays, instead of just executing the fundamentals in getting the puck to the net while providing a screen in front.
In addition, their play is becoming too predictable for the opposing team’s defense, which has allowed them to easily block off Leafs passing lanes and cover specific Leafs players.
As a result, either Savard and the Maple Leafs need to develop some new strategy to utilize, or they should explore mixing the units up to create a new look. (All stats from NHL.com)
Nevertheless, the Maple Leafs need to figure it out soon enough. Otherwise, losing the special teams battle consistently on a nightly basis could end up biting them hard later on in the season, especially during the playoffs like they painfully learned last season.