Larkin: Can we (finally) trust these Toronto Maple Leafs in the playoffs?

Coach Sheldon Keefe seemed to speak through gritted teeth. He was like a proud parent whose kid has gotten straight A’s all year but gets caught cutting class. How could he be mad when the results had mostly been so good all year long?

And yet, he had a hard time hiding his disappointment after his Toronto Maple Leafs delivered a listless effort in Tuesday’s 4-2 home loss to the Buffalo Sabres.

“Games like this are why we’re still competing for home ice in the first round,” Keefe said. “We’ve played so well for most of the season against most of the teams in the league that nights like this are also holding us back.”

“It just didn’t seem like we had much energy on the bench, much energy on the ice,” added center Auston Matthews.

So, yes, the Leafs laid an egg earlier this week and, puzzlingly, have done so in three of four meetings with the rebuilding Buffalo Sabres, who just set an NHL record by missing the playoffs 11 straight times. Maybe it’s a matter of being locked into a playoff spot so long that it was hard to get up for a random Tuesday game in April.

“Yeah, there’s some of that at play for sure,” Keefe said. “That’s why it’s easy for me to push past this one, because we have played so well when the team is challenged. We wish we didn’t have nights like this. We could be a team that’s competing for the Presidents’ Trophy.”

Even the best of teams have off nights, and the Leafs’ .685 points percentage, the second-best in their 104 seasons, puts them on track to easily beat their all-time record for points in a season of 105. But expectations are unique for a team only a few weeks away from facing its Minotaur: the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, a beast that has defeated them five straight times in the Matthews/Mitch Marner era. As we creep toward the post-season, it’s natural to search for weak spots in Toronto’s armor, harbingers of another collapse. This year “feels different,” with the Leafs looking so consistently dominant, but last year “felt different” too, remember?

That’s why it can still sound a few tiny alarm bells when a stacked Toronto team shows it can get dusted by a non-playoff opponent. Will the Leafs choke away a sixth straight season in Round 1? Or is this team genuinely different from other incarnations that flopped?

Let’s compare the six teams of the Matthews/Marner era in a few categories to look for signs of progress. Since offense is up league-wide this season, we’ll look at league rank rather than the actual stats to get a better sense of how Toronto has measured up to its competition.

5-on-5 Offense

Season	Goals/60	Shots/60	Scoring Chances/60	HD Chances/60	Expected goals/60
2016-17	5^th	5^th	2^nd	11^th	2^nd
2017-18	2^nd	16^th	2^nd	8^th	6^th
2018-19	2^nd	7^th	1^st	5^th	4^th
2019-20	8^th	7^th	2^nd	8^th	5^th
2020-21	3^rd	9^th	2^nd	2^nd	4^th
2021-22	3^rd	7^th	2^nd	3^rd	3^rd

No surprises here. The Leafs have been a wagon, offensively, for the entire era, regularly placing among the league’s elite in generating not just chances in high volume but high-quality chances. Owning a skill group including the likes of Matthews, Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Morgan Rielly will do that.

5-on-5 Defense

Season	Goals against/60	Shots against/60	Scoring Chances against/60	HD chances against/60	Expected goals against/60
2016-17	23^rd	27th	22^nd	14^th	25^th
2017-18	14^th	28^th	23^rd	19^th	27^th
2018-19	18^th	29^th	25^th	18^th	25^th
2019-20	27^th	18^th	17^th	21^st	19^th
2020-21	6^th	6^th	17^th	9^th	10^th
2021-22	24^th	12^th	9^th	10^th	8^th

For the first four seasons of the Matthews/Marner era, the Leafs were the NHL’s ultimate high-event team, entertainment incarnate, matching their elite offense with consistently poor defensive play across the board. Last season, which was the first full campaign under coach Sheldon Keefe, saw the team’s identity shift, thanks in large part to the addition of brainy blueliner T.J. Brodie. The Leafs jumped from flat-out bad defensively to solidly above average. This season, their goals allowed suggest they’ve regressed, but check out the other categories. They still grade out as above average in limiting opposing attacks and actually have their best expected-goals-against grade of this era. It’s not too tough to figure out why they’re allowing so many 5-on-5 goals while playing strong defense. That brings us to the next category…

Goaltending

Season	5-on-5 save percentage
2016-17	19^th
2017-18	6^th
2018-19	7^th
2019-20	28^th
2020-21	7^th
2021-22	30th

Last season, the Leafs’ improved defensive discipline formed a fine marriage with Jack Campbell’s breakout season in net. This year, particularly after the calendar switched to 2022, goaltending has been a major weakness. The Leafs have scored their way out of trouble more nights than not, but they won’t go far in the post-season if Campbell can’t figure his game out. Since he returned from a multi-week absence with a rib injury, not much has changed. He has an .891 save percentage yet is 3-0-1 in four appearances. That’s perfectly on-brand for this year’s Leafs.

Special Teams

Season	Power play	Penalty killing
2016-17	2^nd	10^th
2017-18	2^nd	11^th
2018-19	8^th	18^th
2019-20	6^th	21^st
2020-21	16^th	24^th
2021-22	1^st	7th

Here we see a noteworthy difference between this year’s team and the previous ones. Last season marked the worst special-teams year in the Matthews/Marner era, and Toronto’s power-play woes carried over into the playoffs, where they converted just 13 percent of their opportunities. They made a concerted effort to improve their special teams for 2021-22, bringing in Spencer Carbery from the AHL’s Hershey Bears to create a less predictable power-play scheme and Dean Chynoweth from the Carolina Hurricanes to run the P.K. The results speak for themselves.

Intangibles

Qualitatively, there’s a case to be made the Leafs are in a good collective headspace approaching the 2021-22 post season. They’ve been one of the league’s most consistent teams. They’ve put together five winning streaks of five or more games. Their season-long losing streak is four games, and it happened once. They’re 10-5-2 against the seven teams currently occupying playoff spots in the Eastern Conference, including 5-1-1 against the Boston Bruins, Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning. They’re getting career years from multiple players, most notably Matthews, whose 58 goals are already a single-season franchise record with nine games left on the schedule. They have a well-liked, veteran leader added to their dressing room culture in blueliner Mark Giordano. And defenseman Jake Muzzin, their lone high-impact player with Stanley Cup winning experience (with all due respect to Kyle Clifford), was tabbed to rejoin the lineup Thursday. Throw in the desire to get captain John Tavares a do-over after a freak head injury ended his season minutes into the 2021 playoffs and there are plenty of motivational storylines Leaf fans can cling to.

So does that mean the 2021-22 Leafs really are “different”? No, like, different different? We won’t know until we see them compete in the postseason. On paper, however, they’ve maintained most of their statistical gains of the past six years and shown marked improvement in new areas. Ultimately, how far they go might come down to how well their goalie stops the puck.

Advanced stats: naturalstattrick.com

______

POINTSBET IS LIVE IN ONTARIO

PointsBet Canada has officially launched in Ontario! Get a $25 free bet just for signing up right here!