Maple Leafs want you to shout “SHOOT” at your TV

According to the season number of the first 16 games, the Leafs are outscored 492 to 446 and 375-351 in 5v5. The Leafs have beaten their opponents just five times this season, but somewhat contradicting the concern, they have won just one of those games.

The other takeaway that comes into play is that PDO (save percentage + shooting percentage) has dropped. That’s generally a sign that luck has run out, and while luck may be an oversimplification, the more reality is that goaltenders don’t stay on the heater forever, and the same goes for shooters. Counting on Dakota Joshua to get back to a 20% shooting percentage was a gamble many GMs wouldn’t make, even though the Leafs are sixth in the league in high-danger chances and fourth in the league with an unsustainably good 13.9% shooting percentage, perhaps a sign that the Leafs’ problems could get worse (the increasingly difficult schedule should be a concern).

The normalization of goaltending results is a big part of the Leafs’ problems, and it’s not even that they’re normalized; they have had a hard time with it. Cayden Primeau’s -6.8 goals saved above expectations is the second-worst mark in the NHL, while Anthony Stolarz’s -3.7 is sixth-worst, although he improves to seventeenth-worst when looking at GSAE/60. Dennis Hildeby, on the other hand, was a bright spot in his limited time with 1.4 GSAE, despite difficult results.

With Woll’s return, there is some hope for improvement, and Stolarz’s 25.8 GSAE last season and his 20.1 GSAE the year before point to a goaltender who should turn things around, as even on a struggling Ducks team in 2022-2023, Stolarz posted 0.4 GSAE.

Goaltending shouldn’t be the problem. Offense or lack thereof should be.

As mentioned above, the Maple Leafs are one of the top teams in terms of high danger chances and have a pretty high success rate when they actually shoot. A team with Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares and Matthew Knies can still easily consider attacking its identity over goaltending and defense, and the secondary cast of McMann, Robertson, Maccelli, Domi and others is certainly an adequate threat to keep up the offensive pressure for most of the game. Defensemen like Morgan Rielly and Oliver Ekman-Larsson are at their best when pushing the puck up the ice instead of defending, and Marlies like Henry Thrun or William Villeneuve may have something to offer the Leafs as additional offense from the blueline, should the team ever call on them to replace a struggling defenseman like Philippe Myers. The Leafs can boost their offensive numbers again, and given that history shows this doesn’t have much of an impact on the defensive game and it’s hard to imagine physical players like Joshua, McMann, Lorentz or Knies making fewer hits, it seems like the blunting of the Leafs’ creativity needs to be dialed back.

And while that’s easier said than done, as Mitch Marner or his replacement aren’t walking into the Leafs locker room anytime soon and age has a way of slowing down a Leafs team that largely relied on speed as a means of generating offense in the Keefe years, youthful players like Robertson and Cowan are at least a small part of regaining some of that speed and the activation of blueliners like Rielly and Ekman-Larsson provides a little more puck control, helping the team gave up with Marner’s departure.

The Leafs need to be an offensive team to be successful and honestly, that seems like an easier solution than figuring out their defense. They’ve challenged the offensive team identity under Craig Berube and tried to fix the one thing about the Keefe-era Leafs that didn’t need fixing. For what it’s worth, Craig Berube’s Stanley Cup-winning Blues relied on beating opponents and while a goaltender on a heater was undoubtedly the biggest part of the success, Berube’s best years didn’t see his team sitting back as much as today’s Leafs.

It’s not exactly groundbreaking to say that outsmarting your opponents is the path to victory, but for a team that still leans primarily toward offensive success, it seems like focusing on offense to get that result instead of suppressing shots would be the way forward unless Morgan Rielly starts playing like Alex Pietrangelo in his prime.

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