On top of a shockingly poor start to the season, the Toronto Maple Leafs are also dealing with a nasty injury bug, which has forced head coach Craig Berube to regularly tinker with his lineup.
Sometimes challenges to your depth open up new ideas for how to deploy personnel; sometimes they force you into making bad decisions that further impede the performance of your team.
I bring it up because one of those lineup decisions the Maple Leafs organization keeps trying is Max Domi at centre, and, for the life of me, I can’t understand why they keep going to that well.
Domi is a flawed player but, at his best, he’s a gifted passer and playmaker who can juice the offence with the right combination of teammates. But most importantly, he’s shown that he can do that at the wing. When Domi plays down the middle of the lineup, Toronto pays for it and then some.
The data bears this out, and loudly. If you look at Domi’s contributions over the past three years in Toronto and split his performance between the games he’s played centre versus the games he’s played at wing, the results are shockingly different – and that’s true of both his individual production and Toronto’s on-ice performance.
Individually, Domi’s rate scoring at even strength slips from 2.3 points per 60 minutes played when on the wing, to 1.9 points per 60 minutes played – a 17 per cent reduction in scoring. (Note: almost all of this delta is from a reduction in assist rates.) And while there may be some noise in his personal scoring rates, the on-ice numbers are much more signalling.
First, let’s consider how the Maple Leafs score and concede goals depending on which position Domi is playing. At centre, the Leafs are underwater with Domi down the middle of the lineup, but barely. At wing? Toronto is just under a goal per 60 minutes better than the opposition, a stark difference:
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It’s a significant gap in performance to say the least, and it’s underpinned by what you see when you watch Leafs games. Toronto is a mistake factory when Domi is playing centre and routinely playing off-puck in the defensive zone. But when he’s on the wing, Toronto appears to play much more capably in the transition game and are better at sustaining offensive-zone pressure.
Even if you strip out the shooting and save percentages and isolate to expected goals, the gap still exists, and we are measuring a couple hundred games over this sample now:
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One of the first recommendations I would make to a Maple Leafs team trying to pull itself out of this early-season rut is to keep Domi on the wing. The most recent line combinations have him not only playing the role of centre once again, but anchoring an important second line with Nicholas Robertson and Calle Jarnkrok.
It goes without saying the Maple Leafs aren’t going to push their way up the Atlantic Division pecking order with a second line that figures to be outscored on a regular basis; doubly so amidst the injuries and a goaltending regression. Add to the fact that Domi is under 50 per cent in the faceoff circle over his career, and you have every argument you need to entrench him outside.
There are other internal options to play at centre — John Tavares, Scott Laughton, Steven Lorentz, and Jacob Quillan all can play in the middle of the lineup, and that’s ignoring Auston Matthews is typically on line one. Get the most out of Domi’s playmaking and keep him on the wing where he has shown he can positively contribute to the offence.
The video and the math both argue it, and loudly.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference
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