THE LEAFS ARE IN FREEFALL!!!!!

I saw this headline and rolled my eyes. Not just because it's a wind-up, and a wind-up a lot of Leafs fans would trip over themselves to get at to wallow in, but it's not really true. It's just an emotional and overly dramatic framing of a team that has some fundamental problems.

How be we discover what those are?

I'm going to start with goals, which I don't usually do, but goals are the big experiential moment of the game, the big emotional trigger, and the order they come in creates little dramas in-game and across multiple games. The overall picture is easily lost.

Goals

All-Situations

The full experience of a game is all-situations, so if you want to just go find the five-on-five Corsi or xG that suits you and call that the problem, you can. It's an obvious one, for sure. But it's not all of the story. Anyhow: In the beginning, there were goals...

I'm going to look exclusively at per-60-minute measures (from Evolving Hockey as of Friday), not per-game because not all games are the same length, and once you get out of all-situations numbers, they vary even more.

League average goals per game per team is 3.14 right now (per Hockey Reference), but per 60, it's 3.10 and 3.11 for GF and GA (you get to figure out for yourself why they're different). This is on the high side for recent seasons, but it's deep enough into the NHL season that it's likely stabilized close to the season average.

The Leafs are at 3.25 GF and 3.49 GA. That's 13th For and 27th Against. The For ranking puts them in a group of five teams above average by a small amount, so it's fine to just call them the high end of the midrange teams. The Against puts them in with a group of about six teams who aren't as bad as Chicago and Vancouver. Suffice it to say, this is not a winning formula and while the obvious problem is goals against, I don't consider barely above average to be acceptable GF for a team with the offensive capabilities the Leafs have.

Even Strength

League average here is 2.56. The Leafs are 11th in Goals For with 2.65, which is a decent step up from the middle rank teams, but well below the heavy hitters: Colorado, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Washington, Montréal, Boston, New Jersey and Seattle, who are all at 3.0 or more.

In Goals Against, the Leafs are 29th with 3.11. Vancouver and Chicago are just keeping them from being the worst.

Power Play

The Maple Leafs are sixth in the NHL with 11.13, while the League Average is 8.29. They have allowed 0.7 Goals Against while on the power play, which is about average for the League.

Penalty Kill

The Leafs are eighth in the NHL with 5.63 Goals Against, which the League Average is 8.5. They have .5 Goals For which is below average by a tiny bit.

This can't be news that the special teams have averaged out to very good when measured (wrongly) by goals. But what this does say very clearly is this: They won the games they did win needing an unsustainably perfect PK because their base game allows so many goals that an average team with a little bit of puck luck can beat them easily otherwise. Or to say that another way: the Leafs' opponents don't need to be any good on the power play at all, and they can still win quite handily.

That's not winning your special teams battles. That's the illusion of winning at special teams.

Okay, that's enough of the goals; now it's time to look at the things they do that lead to the conditions where goals happen. Or, the parts of the game that are descriptive of what they did, not what they did plus how lucky they were.

Expected Goals

Special Teams

First, the question here is: are the special teams results real, an illusion, all about the goalies or some of all three? For "shots" in this section, I'm using Fenwick (all unblocked shots) because it's what Expected Goals is based on.

In both shots and xG on the power play, the Leafs are above average and sit around 12th, but are a meaningful amount below the heavy hitters. They are on the high side of average, not excellent by any stretch of the imagination.

Expected Goals doesn't capture everything there is to know about a power play, and tactics matter as well as raw talent. The team may continue to score over expected as they have been, but it is a gap that could narrow. Remember, there are two values here that can change, so Kirill Marchenko playing more could help even if there is some regression.

On the PK, the picture is similar. Their xG is just a little better than average on a shot rate that's a little worse, and they have allowed significantly fewer Goals Against than xG Against. Goalies get to be talented, just like shooters, and again, using xG for the PK is an indicator, but don't take 117 minutes of PKs spread out in two-minute intervals too seriously.

Even Strength

This is the meat of the game. This is where you get the results that predict future wins and losses, and it's where a team lives and dies almost always. Even the few instances of poorer even-strength teams that went deep in the playoffs were not awful. Special teams and shooting skill can't make up for really bad overall play.

At even strength, the Leafs are 25th in xGF% and 18th in FF%. Which means they are actually better at limiting the volume shots that make it through to the general vicinity of the goalie than they are at limiting quality. If someone tries the "keep it to the outside" line, or they bring up those Sportlogiq inner-slot shot numbers, be very, very skeptical.

Offensively, the Leafs are above average at shots for, and are ranked 11th. The ranking is deceptive as they are very close to a large group of midrank teams. In case you've forgotten in all these numbers, their goal rate at Even Strength has been quite good; however, the xGF is not at all good, and is ranked 26th. This is a very odd situation where their okay shot rate is eroded quite substantially by the quality of shots they take. I found where the shots are being kept to the outside!

Expected Goals is not perfect here either, and some teams so take a lot of low-danger shots and still prosper. The famous example is the Hurricanes, but they take such a massive volume that they have all the opportunity in the world to experiment with shots from the defence keeping the puck in play. The Leafs don't take a massive volume.

And, of course, their shots against (remember this is Fenwick not SOG) are higher than average at 41.51, while the average is 40.14. They are ranked 24th, but are close enough to the average (we're talking about less than one shot per game here) that I'm fine with calling that okay.

I think it would surprise most people to know their xGA is 2.7, while the average is 2.62. Which is pretty damn okay for a team that has struggled with possession as much as the Leafs have in the last three+ years. I never ask for more than okay defensively from the Leafs, given the strengths and weaknesses of their best players.

Making This Make Sense

Almost bad xGF and almost good GF is not unheard of, and the fewer the games played, the more likely it is to see something wonky like this. However, this is not a terrible problem to have. The Leafs have good enough forwards that they should be able to generate more quality offence, particularly if they can get a stable second line that can play more than one or two games without losing someone to injury.

They have a possession problem, a zone-time problem, a shotshare problem. Those are all the same problem. Weirdly, NHL Edge shows their neutral zone time very high, which might just be part of the problem.

We've trained ourselves to notice the shot clock in-game, to see the team being outshot, to say that's about not getting out of the zone, and yet we're not seeing very clearly that they are exiting well enough but their offence is not effective enough. Their offence right now is not good enough for a team better than okay at defence.

The Leafs absolutely have a goaltending problem. Anthony Stolarz has been average. Which is better than Bobrovsky, to be sure, but when you're okay at defence, and then okay at goaltending, you need pretty special offensive results to get anywhere, and when you do get there, well, what happens if your offensive star is hurt in the playoffs or you play a tough defensive team? I mean, you know what happens; you watched it too.

The goaltending drama is making for a lot of noise. The xG% is a cheap and easy way to point the finger at the coach (I don't know when it became a thing to make the coach solely responsible for that, but it is). The deeper problem is that the path to more goals for than against that the Leafs have travelled so far is unreliable and difficult. The easiest fix is a more effective offensive system.

Here's a thought to end on: what if it isn't William Nylander's personal and individual fault that he doesn't have the puck much sometimes? (It's actually Auston Matthews who is underperforming his norms by a lot.)

The whole system of even-strength play, from the zone exit through to the offensive cycles is just not producing enough of the right conditions for goals for. You can't make that your headline and crank up the emotions, though.

Analysis