The Toronto Maple Leafs are off to a pretty ordinary start to the season. With a collection of thirteen points in twelve games (6-5-1), the Leafs look more like a team in the mix than a team aspiring to the Stanley Cup.
One of the reasons that could explain Toronto’s rather slow start is their poor performance on the power play with a success rate of only 7.9%, which is good for last place in the League. That’s only three goals in thirty-eight occasions!
As James Mirtle says, it’s hard to believe the power play is this bad this year. And since this post was published, that number has gone from 8.3% to 7.9% as the Leafs went zero for four with the man advantage in a 4-2 loss to the Blues at St. Louis.
The problem is that it costs the Toronto team a lot of money to have a numerical advantage which is languishing in the depths of the League. The Leafs’ four star forwards, Auston Matthews, William Nylander, Mitch Marner and John Tavares, cost the team more than $46 million in salary, or 53.1% of the payroll.
If we add the salary of 7.5 million for defender Morgan Rielly, a specialist in power playthat’s a lot of mistakes on the ice rink not to scorer.
Remember also that the team notably offered a contract to former Canadian captain Max Pacioretty in order to offer even more ammunition to a power play which finished seventh in the League last season with a rate of 24 %.
For several seasons, the Leafs’ power play has been at the heart of the team’s success and one might wonder if the problems at the start of the season can be attributed to the arrival of new coach Craig Berube and his assistants. And if these setbacks were to continue, could this end up affecting the team’s overall performance?
However, if the power play is struggling, the Leafs are doing quite well on the disadvantage with an efficiency of 83.3% for eighth place in the NHL. The team also has the fourth best goal efficiency at five-on-five with plus ten.
We can therefore think that with better performance on the power play, the team would have a better record than thirteen points in twelve games. That still gives him third place in the Atlantic Conference, but only four points ahead of the Canadian who currently occupies last place.
Well, the campaign is still young and all it takes is one good night for the Leafs’ power play to unlock, but in the meantime, the team is losing more games than it should.
In burst
– Have a good day for our skaters.
– Bon move for KC!
– Big game from Jackson and Henry!
– Bills win against section rivals.
– Burrow on fire!
– And other NFL games.
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