Bet on Babcock to boost Leafs’ possession numbers

Travis Yost

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If you haven’t already read Frank Seravalli’s 30 Bold Team Predictions column from Monday afternoon, I encourage you to do so. It was an entertaining piece, and I found myself nodding in agreement with at least a dozen of Seravalli’s guesses for the upcoming season.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the stabs Seravalli took concerned Mike Babcock and the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Leafs have remained adamant about this year being one dedicated to player development and rebuilding a player pool that has paled in comparison to other clubs around the league. And yet, there’s still a very real sense that this team could – and maybe should – improve in year one of the Babcock era, with the new coaching staff cleaning up some of the ugly habits and mistakes that became a fixture of the club under the old regime.     

Seravalli didn’t go as far as sending the Leafs to the postseason, but he’s expecting very real improvement. Here’s what he dropped in yesterday’s column:

“27. Thanks to Mike Babcock, the Maple Leafs will make the largest season-to-season jump in possession metrics. The Leafs finished fourth-worst in possession indicators last season, according to war-on-ice.com. The improvement won’t be enough to sniff the playoffs, but it will at least give Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer a slight break. But style will be something to key on, as the new Maple Leafs’ brass continues to build around players that fit their mold.”

Pointing out how abysmal the Leafs have historically graded out as it pertains to shot differential or scoring chance differential is a narrative that has been exhausted beyond belief. The unfortunate reality is that this team’s not going to make a real jump forward until they improve on that front. More than anything else, the Leafs bet on Babcock because his teams have dominated the ‘Analytics Era’ NHL like few teams ever have before. Under his rule, Detroit had the single-best shot differential (54.6 per cent), the second-best scoring chance differential (54.0 per cent), and the fourth-best goal differential (53.2 per cent). Babcock took the talent provided to him by management and moulded them into a 5-on-5 juggernaut.

The thing I find interesting about Frank’s guess here is that the Leafs didn’t sign a bunch of big names in the off-season, something that could drive real improvement. I like Brad Boyes as much as anyone and Shawn Matthias is a sneaky underrated player, but these aren’t game-changing moves. No, Frank’s bet is that simply transitioning from the old coaching staff to one led by Babcock is going to have an immediate effect

Naturally, I grew curious about a couple of questions. One, what’s our target for improvement here? How much do the Leafs need to improve next year from a possession standpoint to make ‘the largest season-to-season jump’? Second, for the teams who have historically made big jumps season-over-season, have any of those teams experienced a coaching change that may have driven favourable results?

For this analysis, I grabbed every team over the last eight seasons and noted any which experienced a five-point possession improvement (about two standard deviations). Then, I looked at each team case-by-case, and whether or not there was a coaching change from one year to the next.

Here are all of those ‘big improvement’ teams: 

The good news: we have seen teams make emphatic jumps in a single season. Ten of them since 2007 have seen a five-point or greater jump, which is pretty significant. The clubhouse leader would be the Arizona Coyotes from 2008 to 2009 (+7.1), who went from lottery-level to playoff-calibre performance in just one full season. For Toronto to beat them out this season, they would have to improve from 45.2 per cent to 52.4 per cent in 2015-2016. Even with Babcock in the fold, that’s a pretty ridiculous hill to climb. (As an aside, I think this speaks volumes about the coaching talent disparity between the likes of Wayne Gretzky and Dave Tippett, but more on that in a minute.)

Working through those teams, something should be apparent: there are a lot of coaching changes in this group. That’s not to say that every coaching change has a positive impact – there are many, many teams who have switched coaches and saw performance stay stable or even drop over time. However, the working theory is that the Leafs didn’t just make a coaching change. They are moving from a poor coaching staff to a good coaching staff, and consequently, the incremental jump should be pretty significant.

To me, this is pretty convincing. It’s not just about moving away from guys like Wayne Gretzky and Denis Savard and Guy Boucher – it’s about getting guys like Dave Tippett, Joel Quenneville, and Jon Cooper, all of whom are still employed with their teams and carry a considerable reputation around the league. 

Even a couple of the ‘no’ teams are intriguing. Mike Yeo was in his second year as Minnesota’s head coach when they made their move. Same thing for Jacques Martin and Montreal when they took a big step during the 2010-11 season.

The Takeaway

Simply firing one coach and hiring another doesn’t ensure that your team will improve in any capacity. But, it’s hard to look at the Leafs situation and anticipate anything other than both short and long-term improvement. I suspect the Leafs will have a tremendously difficult time topping that old Arizona Coyotes team for a variety of reasons, but there’s no reason we can’t expect this team to get near break-even (or, 50 per cent) in shot differential next season. We have seen a bunch of five-point improvements in the past, and if anyone can lead that charge, it’s probably Babcock.