Leafs exit holiday break looking like a balanced contender
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Stop me if you have heard this one before: Exiting the holiday break, the Toronto Maple Leafs are well- positioned in the NHL standings and are starting to build a resume of what looks like a Stanley Cup contender.
You could have stopped me in most of the seasons under Kyle Dubas’ watch, to be sure. Toronto has had a knack for dominating the average NHL opponent for some time now, rarely anxious or concerned about their chances of making the playoffs. But any observer of the Maple Leafs also understands their checkered postseason past, and how little strong regular-season play matters right now. Toronto needs to deliver a winner come April, and little else matters.
One of the fascinating parts of the Maple Leafs under Dubas (and, more recently, head coach Sheldon Keefe) is while they coast through regular seasons, there has always been some area of concern across the lineup. Whether it was the young, immature, mistake-prone blueline from a few years back, goaltending woes, or scoring droughts from their big guns when it mattered most, there has always been an issue. And against your average regular-season opponent, those things may not matter. But when the quality of competition ramps up, these issues become more obvious and exposed.
For that reason, I was curious to see how this year’s Leafs team stacks up to the teams of years past. This year’s squad started off slowly in October, but now sit fourth in the NHL in the standings (21-7-6) with the league’s second-best goal differential (+29). So, let’s compare this year’s team through 34 games against prior years at the same juncture. Where has the team improved, and where may future concerns manifest?
Let’s start with even-strength performance, focusing on offensive and defensive production:
Maple Leafs fans are acutely aware of this by now, but there has been a changing in the guard in terms of the identity of this team at even strength.
The reputation of this team being a frenetic and high-flying offensive team that leaves itself vulnerable on the back end has faded with time – whereas Toronto’s rate-scoring has been flat-to-down for years now (they are just 14th in even strength scoring in 2022-23), their defensive play has significantly improved. Some of this you can attribute to the goaltending they are receiving (more on this in a minute), but I maintain Toronto still has one of the most underrated bluelines in the league.
But make no mistake, goal suppression is a big reason Toronto is well-situated to qualify for the postseason again this year. Their 1.99 goals per 60 minutes conceded trails only the Boston Bruins and Colorado Avalanche, two bona fide Stanley Cup contenders. If you want to isolate on the goaltending angle for a moment, their expected goals against per 60 minutes is 10th best in the NHL. Goaltending has helped this year, but it’s not the only part of the story.
Lastly, what Toronto needs, perhaps more than most teams, is depth players on cheap contracts to produce. It’s the byproduct of their cap allocation, which skews top-heavy. It’s not lost on me that Timothy Liljegren (+16) and Michael Bunting (+19) carry two of the best goal differentials on the league. That’s found money for Dubas.
Let’s head over to the power play:
Much of Toronto’s regular-season dominance in the prior two years stemmed from a blistering power play and Auston Matthews in particular. This season their top unit has cooled off a touch, ranking 12th in the NHL and sandwiched between the Minnesota Wild and Los Angeles Kings.
It does seem that Toronto should have a bit more success on the power play than they are having this year, considering the personnel they can deploy on their five-man unit. Matthews (eight), John Tavares (seven), and William Nylander (six) have accounted for 81 per cent of their scoring on the man advantage, which is rather top-heavy.
But I do think we have the ingredients for a potential breakout looming here. If you look at Toronto’s shot profile on the power play, it’s both extraordinarily dangerous and a mirror image to what we saw last year, when Toronto led the league in scoring (via HockeyViz):
Moving over to the penalty kill:
Toronto runs two consistent penalty-killing units and currently sit with the league’s 10th best performance, conceding 6.8 goals per-60 minutes faced, or about 80 per cent of penalties successfully killed. Justin Holl has been the big minute-muncher on the blueline here, joined by David Kampf and Mitch Marner up top. It’s the same group we saw last year, and there’s little reason to mess with something that has held up nicely for Keefe.
The only thing I think worth monitoring here is the relative success rates between the two units. Marner and Kampf play the lion’s share of minutes together, as do Alex Kerfoot and Calle Jarnkrok. So far, it’s been the Kerfoot and Jarnkrok tandem that’s been more successful, and it’s not particularly close. Some of this is save percentage aided, but the Jarnkrok and Kerfoot duo has been about 8 per cent better when using expected goals, too. At the very least, something to monitor going forward.
Now, bring on the goaltenders.
There is no question that this has been the biggest story of the Maple Leafs season. Toronto took a considerable risk betting on an inexperienced Ilya Samsonov and an under-performing, frequently injured Matt Murray. But both have been fantastic, and Dubas is looking pretty good on his wager here.
The combination of Samsonov and Murray alone have erased 16 goals – worth nearly three wins in the standings already – from the ledger, and that total over their 25 appearances is on par with Ilya Sorokin on Long Island (+23 goals saved in 25 games played). That’s extraordinary!
That said, for the same reasons Toronto’s power play is likely to turn it around (established track record), we still need to see some sustained performance from this group. Even with three months of additional data from this season, we are still a way from being truly confident in this tandem, and this is in the heart of the regular season – not a different animal like playoff hockey.
But if Toronto’s goaltending does hold up, reasonably speaking? This team looks much more capable against tough opponents compared with years past. They are simply a more balanced, defensively able team. It’s a far cry from where they were, and perhaps the franchise has found the mix it was searching for in their quest to win some rounds in the postseason.
Data via Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey, NHL.com, Hockey Viz, Hockey Reference