Less McMann

If you recall from the Leafs series vs Florida, they have a cast of low-cost wingers that move around the lineup. Jesper Boqvist is the most interesting one. He makes $1.5 million and he played almost a full regular season. He appeared in 13 of the 23 games played in the playoffs here he was either on the top line or in the pressbox. The pressbox part makes sense, Brad Marchand took his job. But the flickering in and out of the lineup to play in the top-six is a little bit unusual.

Bobby McMann, who makes $1.35 million, is a markedly better player. He flickers between the third line and the top-six. But something happened between his first season of excitement on the Leafs and his next year of dullness and disappointment. Is it down to him?

Goal scoring affects how you feel about a player, as do some other outcomes on the ice, so a look at those is in order.

McMann scored 12 goals and had 21 points in 56 games in 2023-2024 and 16 goals and 27 points this year in 74 games. I'm only looking at five-on-five here to start. That is a substantial drop in both goal rate and overall points rate.

One of the remarkable things about McMann in his first full-ish year on the Leafs was his shooting pace. He shot (Individual Corsi) at a rate you usually only see in elite top-liners and would have led a lot of other teams. It's virtually impossible to outpace Auston Matthews at shooting. This season McMann's shot pace dropped a little, and he was third on the Leafs behind Matthews and Nick Robertson. However, it's worth noting that everyone on the Leafs you could consider an offensive player dropped in shooting pace by a small amount with the exception of Matt Knies.

Volume of shots is not worth much if you don't shoot from good locations. Nick Robertson's sturdy rate of shooting comes from such terrible locations that by Expected Goals, he's in "why are you here?" territory even on the third line. He sure is fast, though.

McMann's expected goals dropped year-over-year, and by an amount that is dramatic using Evolving Hockey's model and just worrying using HockeyViz's. McMann only has two seasons, one only partial, to judge from, but so far he's scored a little over expected. It's impossible to know if that's something he will do all the time, but it is absolutely the case that if you take any player and lower their expected goals, over time they will score less. In McMann's case, the less came right away this season.

He plays a small amount of power play, and his shot rate there was unchanged, his goal rate unchanged, but his assists rose, and his Expected Goals rose. All I can take from that is that the second unit was just a little better this year.

Okay, so from results, he's doing mostly the same things with the puck, but shooting a little less and scoring a lot less.

In terms of the other things measured in a box score, he did everything a little less. He hit less, and took fewer hits, he took fewer penalties and drew fewer as well, he gave the puck away more, took it away less. And if there was some imperfect count of board battles, we might see less there too.

All of that is mostly about why it feels like there was less McMann. What about real impacts?

HockeyViz shows his sG (an all-in-one number to measure impact at a point in time) going up slightly to this year. This is almost entirely driven by a better penalty differential. In areas of actual hockey play – something I consider more important for evaluating a player rather than the side effects driven by refereeing – he was a little worse. Crucially his degrading performance was in defensive impacts and moving the puck up the ice.

Evolving Hockey shows an everything a little less pattern as well, with one exception that also shows up on HockeyViz with an explanation attached. His impact on Expected Goals for and Goals for rose. Note: this is not just a measure of his personal shooting, but therein lies the explanation. Hockey Viz notes that his proportion of shots that were on-net and unblocked went up. The thing to note here is that there shouldn't be any expectation that will continue. Or get worse or get better, as it's a volatile thing.

Now, if you're not right now thinking: but the team was a little less at everything too, well, I'd be surprised. That's not actually supposed to matter when you look at isolated impacts, but I don't believe that isolation is perfect. However, you can't just assume McMann's waning impact wasn't his doing or more likely due to what he was not doing.

Now, about that Less Leafs thing. At five-on-five, all the measures of shotshare (CF% and its cousins) went down. Goals % went up while Expected Goals % went down. Corsi Against went up, Shots on Goal Against did not, and Goals Against fell. There was less everything, but less included Expected Goals Against as well as actual goals against. So, not just a goalie and bad Corsi and oh the humanity, so dull. That's a big exaggeration. Goaltending was key, but tending goal was easier on the Leafs than it had been in some time.

If you look at McMann's on-ice Corsi and various other measures, you see him bucking the team trend. He's worse defensively than last season. Wait. "He is worse?" Is that correct? Do we use on-ice measures to judge a single player's impacts? No, no we do not. Don't even look at it unless you want to know how people feel instead of what's true.

The most obvious change that could be affecting McMann's impacts and his on-ice results both is his usage. He played a little bit less with top lines and a lot more with Nick Robertson and Max Domi. Now, you remember Nick Robertson shoots a lot, right? Well, only one guy shoots the puck at a time, so that could be the thing dragging down McMann's shooting pace. Nick Robertson and Max Domi both shoot poorly. That could be the thing dragging down his assists. Overall, McMann ended up with a gently positive offensive impact. But his real value comes from the rest of what he does – or rather, used to do – all over the ice.

I'll accept that as a line that trio is not going to be great at defending, keeping shots against down, getting out of the zone, all of that stuff. But, here's the thing... if McMann did what he did in 2023-2024 with Tavares and Nylander (not gifted defensively) and he did it well enough to show seriously good impacts on defending, why can't he do it with Domi and Robertson? In fact... shouldn't his impacts be better? After all, he has to be the guy carrying the line south of the redline.

I confess, I'm coming back to the very unreliable box score numbers for all those non-shooting things – not the individual numbers, just the trend of less about it all, and how that showed up in the shooting as well. Some of that is him. There really was less McMann. He's a better player than Boqvist, his contract is nice and cheap, but I understand why Craig Berube was frustrated with him. I understand how McMann could have been frustrated with his linemates too.

A player like McMann is a five-on-five guy. Nothing about his special teams is special. In a season where the Leafs got better at five-on-five in some key areas that contributed to and magnified their good goaltending, McMann wasn't part of that solution. And where the Leafs got worse, so did he.

This isn't about blame here, and of the people who played third line for the Leafs, he should be the last one moved out, but it's just a little too easy to blame the usual villain or the coach and overlook McMann's own contributions to the theme of less this year.

This matters mostly because the Leafs big personnel problem was this:

• line one – good at everything
• line two – offensively better than line one, gets stuck in the mud in their own zone
• line three – offensively tepid, gets stuck in the mud in their own zone
• line four (final version) – get the puck to the offensive zone and get off

McMann likely was the most effective player on that problematic third line in the regular season. Some of the unwillingness to promote him to line two, and the seemingly odd choice to use Pontus Holmberg over him, had to be a concern that line three was lost without him. But he didn't build on his first season with the Leafs – a season, please remember, where the Leafs were not the classic team of the Keefe era, they were already losing the ability to possess the puck enough.

However, in the playoffs the bottom six was used in close to equal minutes and both lines stopped having any value at all. McMann had some of the worse on-ice results of any forward. In his case, this wasn't a surprise as he hadn't been doing any of the things that translate to winning shifts in the playoffs. The surprises came from Steven Lorentz and Calle Järnkrok.

If you want to use cheap interchangeable forwards on your team like Florida does, you need to have powerful pairs of players anchoring every line. And it's been years of saying this, but the Leafs haven't had a third line that was a solution to any problems since Tyler Bozak was the centre. This year's attempt to have six fourth liners who were less than the sum of their parts was maybe the worst one since Bozie went to St. Louis.

The big glaring problem on the Leafs was the defence for so long that other things faded into insignificance. Now the big glaring problem is the top-six wingers. But Brad Treliving can't ignore that third line. You can't promote any of them to be a cheap top-six winger – none of them are fit for that. You can't use them as they are for any meaningful purpose. You can't go into next year's playoffs with six guys who can't compete at that level.

The Leafs need more there. And that could mean they settle for less in the top six.