The National Hockey League’s regular season is 20 per cent complete, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are at a crossroads.
Deeply uninspired play has driven Craig Berube’s perennial contender to a middling 8-9-2 start, and despite playing in the weaker Eastern Conference, the performance has been brutal enough to speculate if this team could be sellers at the trade deadline.
Selling at the deadline would be an unconscionable thought over the past decade in Toronto, and specifically in the Auston Matthews era. But this Toronto team is being played off the ice at a rate we haven’t seen in a long time, and unless they can pull themselves out of this tailspin, general manager Brad Treliving and Toronto’s front office are going to have an awkward lead-in to the March trade deadline.
It’s easy, and perhaps fair to some degree, to point to a meaningful goaltending regression. Last season’s Maple Leafs team was not the typical even-strength juggernaut we had grown accustomed to, but the combination of Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll were sensational behind an improved Maple Leafs defence.
But that’s broken down considerably year over year (Woll has only been available for one start this season):
Yost1 (Travis Yost)
So yes, goaltending has been a sizable contributor to Toronto’s downturn and Stolarz’s specific decline has been most impactful.
But what’s of much more concern is how routinely this team is struggling to play with any sort of possession game at 5-on-5. Over much of the past decade, Toronto has been notoriously good at sustaining offensive zone pressure and finding their blue-chip attackers in Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, the departed Mitch Marner, and so on to turn scoring chances into goals.
Now? This team is routinely outshot and outchanced most nights, which both puts significant stress on the goaltending and reduces their own scoring opportunities. They are spending too much time bailing water from the boat, and you see it in the shot differentials – consider how Toronto’s pacing this year versus what we have typically seen:
Yost2 (Travis Yost)
Not only is this year in stark contrast to any season prior in the Matthews era, it also looks like a daunting continuation of how Toronto finished last year, an epic slide buoyed entirely by goaltending outperformance.
Strip away the goaltending, as has been the case this year, and those big negative differentials start turning into routine regulation losses. Add the fact their strength of schedule has been very forgiving to start the year, and you have a five-alarm fire brewing.
What’s remarkable is Toronto’s situation could be worse – this is a team that’s scoring on more than 12 per cent of their shots at even strength, which is tops in the NHL. Toronto does have a collection of higher-end shooters, but this degree of outperformance seems unsustainable (their preceding five-year average is 10 per cent), and if that breaks down those shot differentials are going to lead to even bigger negative goal differentials.
At the skater level, you can see how this freakishly high shooting percentage is masking a broader team issue. By on-ice goal differentials, some Toronto skaters – especially inside of their top-six forwards – still look good, outscoring the opposition on the year.
But when you bring shot differentials (which, over longer periods of time, better inform scoring chance rates and corresponding goal rates), you see a team that’s just spending too much time defending the run of play, harkening back to the years of Randy Carlyle’s Maple Leafs:
Yost3 (Travis Yost)
Coaches love preaching patience in these moments, and Berube has tried a similar approach. You don’t want to panic publicly, and there’s enough talent in this locker room to pull themselves out of the hole they have dug.
But privately, I do wonder if concern is genuinely creeping in now. For the first time in a long time, their playoff prospects are up for debate – oddsmakers have it priced at a coin flip right now, an unimaginable fall for a team that had the ninth-shortest odds to win the Stanley Cup in August.
I think that says everything. Toronto needs to start winning, and now.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference
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