When I talked about the basement crew and their interactions with Brad Treliving and the hockey operations department, I said there were some obvious signs of a disconnect. I didn't believe they would have been cool with many of Treliving's choices. Some of them, you bet, not all.

But the big one, the one that now stands out as shocking is that they didn't see the train comin in the Atlantic Division with the rise of several teams who used to be reliably horrible. I bet the basement crew did.

I'm in a unique position because I write about the other team for every game the Leafs play, and I have been doing this for years. It's a very valuable way to look at the NHL because you see a team starting to put it together before it's obvious in the standings.

Normal fan interaction with teams is trash talk. Childish stuff that runs down the other teams, and like anything that isn't true, you repeat it often enough and you start to believe it yourself. So for fans, the more casual the better, the Habs are that joke of a team that doesn't have any forwards and the Sabres are where they go to watch the Leafs play after going to the outlet mall. The Senators are out in the suburbs, and they're run by silly people who don't know what they're doing. That last one might actually be still true.

It's okay for fans to think this still holds true. It's really not okay if the GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs does nor if he told the CEO of MLSE that it's all cool, they're a buncha losers, we can half ass our way to glory.

How easy is it to have seen this train coming?

2021-2022

Standings

  1. Florida: 122 points
  2. Toronto: 115
  3. Tampa Bay: 110
  4. Boston: 107
  5. Buffalo: 75
  6. Detroit: 74
  7. Ottawa: 73
  8. Montréal: 55

Tampa lost in the SCF to Colorado after beating the Leafs in the first round.

Five-on-five Expected Goals %

  1. Boston: 58 (first in the league)
  2. Florida: 56 (second)
  3. Toronto: 56 (third)
  4. Tampa Bay: 53 (10th)
  5. Ottawa: 47 (25th)
  6. Buffalo: 46 (27th)
  7. Detroit: 46 (29th)
  8. Montréal: 45 (30th)

The first clue is actually here. Ottawa at 47% is only one percentage point away from the Blues at 19th. They are just floating there in the soup right below the big leviathan that is the middle rank of NHL teams every year. At the time, though, this was not all that obvious, and no one could absolutely know which way they would float – up or back down.

2022-2023

Standings - xG - xG Ranking

  1. Boston: 135 - 54 - sixth
  2. Toronto: 111 - 54 - fifth
  3. Tampa Bay: 98 - 51 - 15th
  4. Florida: 92 - 54 - seventh
  5. Buffalo: 91 - 49 - 21st
  6. Ottawa: 86 - 51 - 16th
  7. Detroit: 80 - 46 - 26th
  8. Montréal: 68 - 43 - 29th

If you bet the Panthers were bad because of their standings points, you'd have been surprised to find them in the SCF, losing to Vegas. After beating the Leafs in the second round.

This is the point at which anyone should start noticing the Senators. At 16th in xG%, they are smack dab in the middle of the league. In this season, there was a tranche of teams below the top performers that was quite large and included the Leafs, the Panthers and also Vegas, a group that has dwindled this season to about four teams (one of which is Vegas).

A glance at the Sabres here should make you intrigued because they are over 50% in Corsi, and with some tweaking around the periphery in special teams and particularly goaltending, they'd be well up the standings, in any other division, that is.

2023-2024

Standings - xG - xG Ranking

  1. Florida: 110 - 54 - fifth
  2. Boston: 109 - 51 - 17th
  3. Toronto: 102 - 52 - ninth
  4. Tampa Bay: 98 - 49 - 21st
  5. Detroit: 91 - 46 - 26th
  6. Buffalo: 84 - 47 - 25th
  7. Ottawa: 78 - 49 - 19th
  8. Montréal: 76 - 46 - 27th

Florida won their first Cup over the Oilers. Toronto lost to Boston in the first round.

This was Detroit's first paper tiger season where they seemed like a playoff team for a while based on the fourth highest team Shooting % in the league. Believers in the sanctity of the standings will have come away from this season with a host of wrong ideas about the teams in the Atlantic. Ottawa had the second-worst team Save %, but was fairly clearly on par with Tampa and Boston in their basic gameplay that year. Buffalo struggled in a lot of areas and you'd be forgiven for thinking they'd peaked at almost mediocre.

2024-2025

Standings - xG - xG Ranking

  1. Toronto: 108 - 49 - 19th
  2. Tampa Bay: 102 - 52 - 10th
  3. Florida: 98 - 55 - second
  4. Ottawa: 97 - 50 - 14th
  5. Montréal: 91 -47 - 27th
  6. Detroit: 86 - 47 - 26th
  7. Buffalo: 79 - 47 - 28th
  8. Boston: 76 - 48 - 24th

Florida won their second Cup after beating the Leafs in the second round.

The Leafs, as you may recall, scrapped hard to beat the Senators in the first round. And that was not just because of the way each team had a game that was built to beat the other. It was also because they were pretty even in all ways save goaltending. No one ever needed to look at a number of any kind to see that. Watching the games was enough.

The rest of the division all looked equally bad, but if you pull back and look at the whole league, you would have seen the start of the situation we have now in this season of a mass of 50/50 teams. Last year there were four legitimately bad teams. The jump from them to the Sabres on the xG scale is significant. The top of the league (the Hurricanes, naturally) dwindles down through the top eight, and then the giant chunk of not good enough all the way down to almost okay is most of the NHL.

If all you look at is the ranking in the division, all those teams other than Ottawa are super bad. Many, many fans thought this, but there's no excuse for someone who is tuned into the NHL 24/7 to not have some clue about what was going on.

The performance of the Habs last year is something anyone running a team in the Atlantic should have been focused on. It would have been easy to do, the media coverage was intense. They were fun! They score! They're young, and the NHL is getting younger and younger went the falsehood. St. Marty is a genius!

The Habs had pretty awful goaltending, not Sabres bad or Bruins bad, but unhelpful. Hey, what if those other teams weren't sewered by their goalies – no, no ignore that, the light is definitely the glimmering dawn of a new day.

2025-2026

I'm not going to list off the numbers, but the quality of the Senators is obvious, they are third in the league in xG% and up there with the Hurricanes and the Avalanche. Their goaltending is appalling, and if they don't make the playoffs, I'd fire the entire management team for malpractice. I don't like them and I'm incensed on their fans' behalf.

If you're really so fucking stupid that you can't see who Ottawa is just by looking, you should have quit as GM, buddy. If you're shocked the Lightning have had a resurgence in the longest retool in history – the one we just never mention because it debunks the common wisdom about "windows" – well, also, you deserve what you got.

The Canadiens, the Sabres, the Red Wings, the hungover and injured Panthers, they're all just okay. The Sabres have ridden the goalie to a lot of points, and there's no law that says they won't keep doing that in the playoffs, but getting to okay, getting to the point the goalie can vault you up the standings was there to be seen. The Red Wings, I'm not sure I take them seriously yet.

The train was inevitable is the other thing that should have been understood. I think you could tell this story in "scout talk" and get to the same place. Look at their rosters, their prospects about to break through over the last five years, and that's where these numbers came from. So it's doubly appalling that this statement was ever made. What were the pro scouting department doing?

One final note: Don't look at the bounce-back Bruins for solace. They are actually pretty shitty.

I hear the train a comin....

Analysis