Loaded Leafs should chase scoring mark

Travis Yost

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Offence, offence and perhaps a little bit more offence – that will be the story of the 2018-19 Toronto Maple Leafs.

The addition of superstar centre John Tavares into a lineup already flush with goal-scoring talent gives Mike Babcock an embarrassment of riches up front. Even with the losses of proven scoring commodities in Tyler Bozak (St. Louis) and James van Riemsdyk (Philadelphia), there is still a lot of firepower sprinkled through Toronto’s four lines.

Just look at the shooting percentages of the forwards expected to win starting jobs for the beginning of the season. I created a hypothetical lineup as a quick example, but it seems reasonable enough to assume that the only spots up for grabs are on the fourth line, where five or six forwards will fight for three spots.

Each forward noted is being compared to the average shooting percentage (2016-18) of all regular forwards over the last two seasons. And as you can see, the Leafs are loaded with guys who are high-grade shooters:

Zach Hyman has an edge to his game that the Leafs organization clearly loves, and it seems like Babcock and the rest of the coaching staff will deploy him in a top-nine role where he can ease some of the defensive burden off of the team’s better goal scorers. Tyler Ennis will likely be fighting for his role on the fourth line all season – you could easily see someone like Josh Leivo, as one example, stealing his ice time right out of the gate.

I bring up Hyman and Ennis because they are the only two shooters in this lineup who score goals at a rate below league average. That means 83 per cent of the lineup is made up of guys who convert on scoring opportunities better than the average forward around the league. And some of these percentages are just ridiculous. Auston Matthews (16.0 per cent) and Nazem Kadri (14.5 per cent) in particular score at freakishly high rates.

This doesn’t even account for the impact adding another player like Tavares may have on his teammates. We know playmakers, particularly centres, can greatly influence the shooting percentages of their wingers. You would have to imagine that a player like Tavares could have a demonstrable effect on Hyman, Mitch Marner and so forth. (Tavares’ career on-ice shooting percentage, which would account for not only his shot rates but also those of his teammates, sits at 10.5 per cent. That’s more than two percentage points better than the league average forward.)

So we know that Toronto, offensively speaking anyway, is pretty loaded. But there have been other monstrously productive teams in years past, too. It made me wonder what the “outer limits” so to speak, look like for a team when it comes to scoring.

In 2017-18, the Leafs averaged 3.3 goals per 60 minutes. A fantastic offensive season, but it still wasn’t good enough for top honours – that belonged to their division rival in Tampa Bay, who averaged a whopping 3.5 goals per 60-minutes.

Looking at the last 11 years, where scoring has been pretty stable, you can see that both teams are already in the upper echelon of offensive performance. But they aren’t at the top of the mountain:

Both teams were well above the average goal-scoring team. Tampa Bay was already pushing the outer limits of what we have observed from teams in the past – they finished the 2017-18 season with the second best per-60 scoring we have seen in the modern era (defined here as from 2007 on), trailing only the 2009-10 Washington Capitals.

The 2009-10 Washington Capitals are, for all intents and purposes, our extreme for offensive production. That team scored a whopping 3.6 goals per-60 minutes. In a raw sense, that means they scored 43 more goals than the 2017-18 Maple Leafs, which seems hard to imagine. Alexander Ovechkin, Alex Semin, Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Knuble, Brooks Laich, Tomas Fleischmann – just six forwards – combined for a jaw-dropping 200 goals, which was more than the entire Buffalo Sabres team last year.

So how does Toronto get there? The biggest spread between the two teams comes down to power play frequency. Washington’s power play was virtually unstoppable that season. They converted on better than 25 per cent of their man advantage opportunities, amassing 79 goals. What’s interesting is that Toronto converted at an identical rate last year. The difference is that Capitals team had 88 more power-play opportunities, and from there, 23 incremental goals. Point being: The 2009-10 Capitals are still the best offence we have seen in recent history. And their +85 goal differential during the regular season is still the best number we have seen since 2007-08.

Can Toronto get to that point? They have already proven they have the firepower to get into the conversation. The addition of Tavares should further advance that conversation. Add a little bit of discipline at 5-on-5 and strong seasons from their younger attackers and the Leafs have as good a chance as anyone to dethrone that legendary Capitals unit.