The Maple Leafs On Paper vs. the Maple Leafs On the Ice

There was a little pushback after I wrote a post about the Toronto Maple Leafs’ new roster through an analytics lens. Fair enough. In fact, one comment made a pretty good point. The analytics say the Maple Leafs have improved. Expected goals, shot quality, and other numbers used to evaluate the new players all point in the same direction. Toronto came out on top of the list.

But then comes the part analytics can't really answer. How do all the pieces fit together? That's a pretty important question.

A Good Player Isn't Necessarily the Right Piece.

One commenter put it nicely: “How do all the pieces fit together? Does the roster mesh?” Exactly. A hockey team isn't 23 individual player evaluations sitting side by side. It's a group of players who have to play together, understand where the other guy is going, accept their roles and somehow turn all those individual pieces into one functioning hockey team.

That's where things get a little murkier for the Maple Leafs. Some players on this roster look better individually than some of the players they replaced. The analytics can see that. They can measure what a player has done and make an educated guess about what he might do next.

What they can't really measure is whether Player A makes Player B better. Or whether two players who look good on their own actually complement each other. Or whether a team has too many players trying to fill the same role. And that last part is worth watching in Toronto.

The Maple Leafs Bottom Six Question.

The Maple Leafs still seem to have an awful lot of players who look like bottom-six forwards. That doesn't mean they're bad players. The fact is that every player who plays in the NHL is a good hockey player. You can't get this far without being able to play.

A team needs good bottom-six forwards. It needs players who can check, kill penalties, win faceoffs, play physical hockey and give the top players a little breathing room. But eventually somebody has to decide what all those pieces are supposed to do. That's the part of roster building that doesn't show up very well in a spreadsheet.

John Chayka appears to have built this roster with roles in mind. There's more size. More physicality. More defensive responsibility. More players who can do specific things. Now comes the fun part.

Can New Head Coach Jim Hiller Turn Those Pieces into a Team?

That's the great unknown. And honestly, that's why the analytics piece and the skeptical reader can both be right. The numbers can say the Maple Leafs have improved their roster. A fan can look at the lineup and wonder whether all those improvements actually fit together. Neither observation cancels out the other.

The analytics are telling us something useful. They're giving us a starting point. They're saying, essentially, “Look at this roster. There are reasons to believe it's better.” Now the Leafs have to prove the second part. They have to make it work.

That's why the first few months of this season should be fascinating. Not because the analytics were wrong if Toronto struggles, and not because the numbers were prophetic if the Maple Leafs win. It's because, eventually, the spreadsheet has to become a hockey team. And that's where the real test begins.