October is over, the baseball distraction is in the past, and the Maple Leafs won their last game. They should try to do that more often.

Tonight's contest is lucky game 13 as the Leafs host the Pittsburgh Penguins who are tanking in a very unusual way. Evgeni Malkin, the fourth oldest skater in the NHL this year was fourth in the NHL for points as of yesterday. He's also a little poorer:

Malkin fined maximum for slashing in Penguins game | NHL.com
Forward penalized $5,000 for actions against Jets defenseman Stanley
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Pittsburgh is also top four in the Eastern Conference as of yesterday.

This game (on Prime) marks the start of another gentle part of the schedule for the Leafs where they play the full week at home. They have a back-to-back on the weekend, but they only have to travel as far as their beds in between.

So far the Leafs have been kinda okay on average with kinda bad goaltending and kinda bad power play performance which has them solidly mediocre. They did all this in 12 games, barely leaving home and playing weaker teams.

The game no one watched on Saturday was a kinda mediocre performance that nonetheless got the job done, and that's got to continue.

What's going on with this team?

From the defence, they're getting a very mixed bag of results – I'm using the Evolving Hockey RAPM numbers. I don't care about points. I don't care who is scoring goals. And nothing about who has or has not scored means anything at so early. Why?

This is how it's meant to be done: you expect unrepresentative results after a dozen games. Not, to be clear, grudgingly admitted to after you've rolled around in the muck of who is guilty and bad and permanently injured, and oh, just give up now! You start out expecting it all to be ghosts and illusions. Even the good bits.

Why? Well that's one of those "how the universe works" issues. If hockey was less random like basketball, for example, the information would be more solid by now. Not this gelatinous goo we can all try to shape into the foundation of whatever narrative we like. But it isn't. And the nature of randomness is this, to quote Mike Johnson from an early game: just because a guy is a 20-goal-scorer doesn't mean he's going to score one goal every four games. The corollary, which no one wants to ever hear, is that just because a guy has scored three goals so far, doesn't mean he's potting twenty this year.

Defenders play more minutes, so that's where you'll find a player who is fairly representative of the team. Jake McCabe. He's average overall, maybe a little above, and he's leading the team in defensive measures and is weak offensively.

Both Morgan Rielly and Oliver Ekman-Larsson are hot offensively, and are at least average defensively so that they're both near the top of the team in positive impacts overall.

The bad is coming from Brandon Carlo, who has the worst impact for defenders, edging out the big surprise of the early going – Chris Tanev, who has not been good. He's played a lot less than anyone else and is likely seriously hurt again, so that's a problem for down the road. The standard applies: assume it's just randomness of the early going and don't worry about it until it doesn't clear up on its own.

Carlo shows up so bad, I'm inclined to think there's some ghosts here of how RAPM is calculated coupled with the small amount of information that's making him into the mirror image of OEL and Rielly.

Simon Benoit has been okay unlike all of last season where he was terrible, so none of the defenders leaps out as the cause of what has ailed the Leafs.

The bottom six have some players who haven't performed up to their own standard. Max Domi had a terrible start last year before he rose back up to his standard ability. He is terrible again this year early. Nic Roy has been struggling at times offensively as has Bobby McMann. He's a role player offensively, and his defending is okay, so this is not a big issue, but he's not adding a lot. None of these minor problems really matter, however. None of these players are so far off what they are at their best nor do they play enough to be a central cause of the malaise.

Auston Matthews is central to the team. His offensive performance is just a little bit below his par, but his defensive numbers are abysmal. As the wingers rotate in and out on his line, some have been good: Easton Cowan, Nick Robertson (I suspect careful usage for both of them) and some okay: William Nylander and Matias Maccelli. Max Domi and Bobby McMann have been less than stellar.

What links all of those people? They all skate faster than Matthews. Speed on that line is one of the things that left in Mitch Marner's luggage, and I think Craig Berube is looking for that as well as offensive ability. Fixing the Matthews line is paramount, and just picking a guy and sticking with him might do a lot of the work.

Other things left with Marner, and filling in for those missing skills is not Nic Roy's job or Max Domi's. It's the second tier players: John Tavares, Nylander, Matt Knies. They have to be the guys to bring it every night.

Are they? Sort of. Tavares is not the player he used to be at even strength, and he's only okay at offence creation. He scores goals, but he's not a line driver in the offensive sense, so taking Nylander away from him has a cost. Nylander had been okay – and obviously a little injured some of the time – but his defensive results are awful, and they should be about average while his offensive impacts are good when they should be great.

He was highlighted early for not shooting much, but beyond that he's played well below the level of a player who is supposed to be all he can be plus a little more. I don't harbour any doubts he'll sort this out.

But the biggest issue in terms of this tier and their performance is Knies. He's a very small amount above average both offensively and defensively, and that makes him only okay overall. He's not far off Nylander's xG+/- and the two of them are ninth and tenth on the team.

That's not cutting it.

It's not just a goaltending problem, but that has been weak to bad. It's not just Auston Matthews, but he has to bring something defensively to buy himself the time to shine offensively. It's not just the next group down the pecking order, but they are all (excepting Tavares and Rielly) playing like they think someone else is going to pick up the slack.

The slack is lying there untouched. And that's the problem.

In better news, Chris Tanev was released from hospital in Philadelphia and has returned to Toronto. Dakota Mermis has been recalled from the AHL. No further details yet on Tanev's condition, but it doesn't seem likely he's playing anytime soon.

The Marlies are having some injury troubles:

And as mentioned yesterday in comments David Kämpf is not with the team right now as he sorts out his future. I'm sure we'll get clarity on that fairly soon.

Now how's that for a happy Monday rundown? See you later for the game (7:30 start).

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