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Ten games into the season, the Toronto Maple Leafs have an array of team performances guaranteed to frustrate the Leaf Nation. On the positive side of the ledger:
- #1 in goals scored (37)
- #1 in shots taken (320)
- #5 in shooting percentage (11.6%)
- #6 in power play opportunities (48)
But it is not hard to see what ails the Leafs. Here are the ugly pieces of the story:
- #24 in power play success (12.5%)
- #1 in short-handed situations allowed (66)
- #3 in short-handed goals allowed (14)
- #22 in penalty killing percentage (78.8%)
- #23 in save percentage (88.4%))
- #30 in shots allowed (354)
- #30 in goals against (41)
The odd part of this profile is the power play. In today´s NHL it is hard to lead the league in scoring without having a functional power play. Yet the Leafs have accomplished this feat. The good news for the power play is that Kyle Wellwood may soon return to the lineup. The bad news is that Darcy Tucker is on the shelf.
Between the pipes, we know that the goaltending tandem of Vesa Toskala and Andrew Raycroft has struggled. The Leafs team save percentage is ranked 24th in the NHL. But, in fairness to these guys, the defence is not helping out. On defence, this is a team in crisis. Toronto leads the league in both shots allowed (an average of 35.4 per game) and goals allowed (a goals against average of 3.99).
The most powerful predictor of goals against is, in fact, shots allowed. Are all the penalties to blame for all those shots on goal? Or is it a broader defensive malaise?
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I set out to answer these questions by mapping the shots allowed to the individual players on the ice at the time of the shot. From that data one can calculate a Short-Handed Shots on Goal Average (per 60 minutes of shorthanded play) for each Leaf with some short-handed time:
White, Blake and Pohl have spent little time on the penalty kill. So their good results might just reflect some good fortune.
But Sundin´s numbers are credible and distressing. They seem to suggest that it might be best for his short-handed time to go elsewhere. Among the forwards, Devereaux and Steen might be the best candidates to get this work.
If you ignore White´s numbers, Kaberle emerges as the Leafs´ best defender while short-handed. But he has had roughly half the penalty killing time of Wozniewski whose performance has been lacking.
It is to be expected that more shots are allowed while short-handed. So this analysis does not really answer the questions I posed. To do that it is also necessary to have a look at even handed play. So here are the Even Handed Shots on Goal Averages (per 60 minutes of even handed play) for each Leaf:
This table clearly shows that even-handed defence is also a big contributor to the Leaf´s high shots totals. Only four players have an even-handed shots on goal average of less than 30. Two of these players, Ponikarovsky and Gamache, have not been in full attendance during the year-to-date defensive carnage and missed some of the worst team performances. And Stralman has played only one game.
From this list, we can again draw conclusions about individual defensive performance.
They have been doing it on offence but Antropov and Sundin have also been leading the way in even-handed defence. Does this perhaps prove that the best way to play defence is in to keep the puck in the offensive zone? In fact in the NHL´s plus/minus stat, Nik Antropov leads the way (+10) and Mats Sundin is tied for forth (+8). And what´s the deal with Jason Blake? He typically skates with Antropov and Sundin yet has the highest shots against average of any Leaf regular.
On defence Gill and White have performed best while Kubina, who lead the Leafs in ice time against Atlanta, and Wozniewski, who sat for the Atlanta game, look like the laggards.
If I were Leafs coach Paul Maurice, I would be deeply worried about this picture. Too many penalties, an ineffective penalty kill and too many shots on goal while even handed. Add to that a struggling power play and you begin to wonder if there is something wrong with the systems that have been installed for this team.
