The Maple Leafs' Greatest Strength Is Also Its Greatest Weakness
Their core lacks an essential ingredient that doesn't get talked about enough.
On the surface, the Toronto Maple Leafs are one big contradiction. Ever since tanking following the Dave Nonis/Randy Carlyle era to get their core pieces — namely Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, and William Nylander — they’ve been a juggernaut. Since 2016, they’ve won at least 60 percent of their regular season games on four separate occasions, which is bonkers. Matthews is in the prime of his career, and already has two Rocket Richard trophies and a Hart to show for it.
And yet they haven’t won a single playoff round since becoming competitive. But at what one point is 39 playoff games no longer a sample size? It sounds like a contradiction: how can a team that wins so much more than it loses in the regular season suddenly lose so much more than it wins in the playoffs? It only looks like a contradiction if you’re looking in the wrong places.
Just to be clear, this is not my opportunity to trample on the Maple Leafs’ early grave. Sure, I get sick of them like anyone else from a less visible team, especially when it’s time for the playoffs, and high profile media members begin dogging on teams with potential to take away their uncreative re-runs of Edmonton vs. Calgary, or Toronto vs. Boston. Yes, Edmonton vs. Calgary is a lot of fun, but so was Edmonton vs. Dallas in the 90s. The point here is that I’m not looking to add my name to the Hot Take Pile.
Nor am I here to put a toe tag on them. We have every reason to believe they’ll snap out of it. They’re shooting at six percent (!). The team below them? The Colorado Avalanche. They’re gonna win games, and they’re gonna start winning games the way they’ve always done — by scoring. But since this is about now, why aren’t they winning now? Why aren’t they beating some of the league’s worst teams?
Actually, let’s rephrase that: why are their players losing their shit on live television?
This was Marner after getting benched by his head coach, throwing a tantrum in the hallway by breaking a brand new stick.
Why is their coach ostensibly throwing one of their best players under the bus in front of his teammates, only the second time they’ve publicly clashed heads?
Why is Steve Dangle using phrases like “it’s over” in a way that suggests Toronto just wasted the prime years of some of the game’s most premier talent?
Perhaps they have. Perhaps it’s the Worst Parts of the Bible time in Toronto just 10 games into the season. There are a lot of good theories. Their bottom six is terrible despite being made of various analytic darlings (I’m ‘meh’ on this theory). Keefe has waffled on some of his forecheck tactics (also ‘meh’ although I’d agree with anyone who thinks Keefe isn’t the coach to maximize this roster). There’s the mental toughness (or just plain toughness) angle. Inasmuch as there’s validity to this idea, Steve Dangle’s “lunch money” rant is the single best articulation of it you’ll ever hear. Then there’s Kyla Dubas. Let me just say that I dig on the general progressive nature of their organization: their vested interest in development, and Dubas himself seems to understand that analytics are how we separate knowledge-that from knowledge-how. But…his trade record is garbage (even accounting for the mess he had to clean up from the previous regime and the flat cap), and for all the talk about how much he’s an “analytics GM” his record doesn’t reflect that (to say nothing of this past offseason, which just may end up being his tenure’s nadir). My personal opinion, which probably isn’t original, is this:
The core lacks diversity.
In any sport, who are the best teams? Are they the teams who are uniformly the fastest? Are they the teams who are uniformly the biggest, meanest, or most skilled? No, the best teams are the most diverse teams; teams where different skillsets and mindsets are represented. If you have a core of say, five different players, but their talents are physically homogeneous — as in, they play roughly the same way, approach the game roughly the same way, and have an advantage over their opponents the same way — then you end up with a competitive disadvantage.
What is Matthews’ solution to a hockey problem?
Given his incredible offensive impact (+19): shoot your way out. What is Nylanders’ solution to a hockey problem?
Given his incredible offensive impact (+11): shoot you way out. What is Tavares’ solution to a hockey problem?
Given his incredible offensive impact (+8): shoot you way out. What is Reilly’s solution to a hockey problem?
Given his (less) incredible offensive impact (+3): shoot you way out. What is Marner’s solution to a hockey problem?
And so forth.
Matthews and Marner have pretty strong defensive impacts, so this isn’t about offense versus defense; it’s part of it but not all of it. Nor is this a criticism of the players in a vacuum; many teams would kill for a core this talented. No, this is a criticism about their collective advantage: do they have what it takes to win big when there’s so little diversity in how their core approaches the game?
You’d be hard pressed to think of a similar core in hockey. Tampa Bay’s core was defined by one of the game’s most creative wingers, a center whose pace of play is second to none, one of the game’s best defensemen, and one of the game’s best goaltenders. Colorado didn’t have goaltending, but they had MacKinnon, Makar, lots of offense in the back (Girard, Byram), and lots of defense in the front (Nichushkin, Lehkonen): divergent play from top to bottom. And who can forget Nazem Kadri? It’s possible the Leafs are better team with Kadri instead of Tavares. Yes, it’s the money and what they could have done with the extra cap. But Kadri scored 2.34 pts per 60 in his seven seasons with Toronto. That’s a top three forward’s production. His breakout was entirely predictable. Say what you want about Kadri and his playoff suspensions, but few players played with more effort than Kadri. Nothing hardwires the brain toward grown man Give A Shit levels like being surrounded by hatred.
Getting back to the core’s milquetoast uniformity, you see this at the team level too. In the six seasons taken together since their core began developing together (2016), Toronto is:
1st in Goals For per 60
3rd in expected Goals For per 60
They are also:
20th in Goals Against per 60
20th in expected Goals Against per 60
One core. One profile. Same results.
TL;DR: they should have recognized the lack of diversity in their core a long time ago, and changed it. Instead they filled that diversity along the margins (Muzzin, Simmonds, Clifford, Brodie) leaving the core…the players who get the most minutes in the most critical situations…the exact same while expecting different results. Toronto isn’t a bad team. They just have a bad problem. And it’s been there for longer than 10 games.