Hockey Bytes: This Time Feels Different for the Maple Leafs — Will It Last? 🍁
Plus, the disappointing Blackhawks fire their coach.
Welcome to Hockey Bytes — a weekly NHL column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various hockey spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Hockey Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🧊 A New Leaf
It’s always silly to suggest that this is finally the year when everything will be different for the Toronto Maple Leafs. After all, the franchise hasn’t lifted the Stanley Cup since 1967, instead making a habit of playoff heartbreak so consistent that you can plan your spring schedule around it.
But… hear me out. The 2024-25 Leafs are at least trying something different — and it has them looking like they might be more genuine Cup contenders than usual. (I know, I know.)
For one thing, they managed to weather the early absence of new captain and top offensive threat Auston Matthews quite well. During his recovery from an upper-body injury, which cost him almost the entire month of November, Toronto managed to go 7-2, with the rest of the team’s star contingent (Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares) still carrying the load in addition to the emerging play of 22-year-old LW Matthew Knies.
Matthews has returned to action with a bang, notching 3 goals and 5 points in 3 games since hitting the ice again. Given his disappointing early-season stats, he’ll still need to keep his per-game production high over the rest of the year to even come close to last year’s scoring benchmarks. But from the Leafs’ perspective, maybe he won’t have to do that in order for them to succeed — a sign of progress for a team whose offense collapsed in the playoffs when Matthews was hampered by illness and injury.
Two more key factors that helped Toronto thrive without its best player— and could prove crucial in the playoffs — are the Leafs’ improved play on defense and in net under new coach Craig Berube this season. As of Thursday afternoon, Toronto ranked No. 2 in fewest goals per game allowed, tracking to be their best defensive showing since the fabled 1992-93 season (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was the closest Toronto came to making the Final since 1967).
Instead of featuring Felix “The Cat” Potvin between the pipes behind Dave Ellett and Todd Gill, with Doug Gilmour covering the middle of the ice, these Leafs have the highly effective tandem of Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll in net, with Conor Timmins, Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe manning the blueline and Tavares taking on the two-way pivot role. Stolarz and Woll have been particularly stellar, ranking No. 3 in the league in save percentage, and the team also ranks No. 6 on the penalty kill — big upgrades from last year’s twin No. 23 rankings in each category.
Since the beginning of the Matthews/Marner/Nylander era in 2016-17, Toronto has typically averaged 51.1 adjusted Goals Above Replacement (GAR) per year on defense and an additional 14.4 GAR from its goaltenders. This season, however, the Leafs are on pace for 64.4 GAR on defense and another 40.1 in net, a huge upgrade over their recent formula:
One has to think that the team’s below-norm (if still slightly above league average) offensive output will rebound some as well with Matthews back on the ice — particularly given the early numbers since his return. There’s a reason the Leafs’ odds to make — or, God forbid, actually win — the 2025 Stanley Cup Final are currently as high as they’ve been all season:
Now, who are we kidding? These are the Leafs — they’ll almost certainly find a way to mess this up. But the early signs do offer hope that (maybe, finally, actually, we-really-mean-it-this-time, no-kidding, please-stop-laughing) Toronto might just be serious about ending its championship drought this year.
🧊 Hawk Through-a
Before the season, when I listed out my burning questions for 2024-25, one was how good the Chicago Blackhawks could be in Connor Bedard’s second season. I had thought the Hawks might improve by quite a bit, given how they added more net GAR than any other team in the league over the offseason — with a haul that included newcomers Teuvo Teravainen, Laurent Brossoit, Tyler Bertuzzi, T.J. Brodie, Ilya Mikheyev and Alec Martinez.
(Actual quote from me: “The Blackhawks should be among the most improved teams in the NHL next season.”)
Ooooops.
Instead of contending for the postseason, Chicago has started the year 8-18 — on pace for a league-low 67.1 points in the standings with 0 percent playoff odds in my Elo forecast. And as is the rule in hockey, the coach must pay. So it was that ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski reported Thursday evening that the Blackhawks had relieved coach Luke Richardson of his duties after three seasons at the team’s helm.
Fired coaches are usually undone by poor goaltending, but the Blackhawks actually haven’t been bad in net. Between Petr Mrázek and Arvid Söderblom, Chicago ranks 13th in SV% and No. 8 in goaltending GAR. Instead, the problem has been a bad defense — they’re 27th in suppressing shots per game and 21st in goals allowed despite the solid puck-stopping — and especially horrid offense. The Hawks are second-worst in goals scored per game, ahead of only the Nashville Predators (who also loaded up to no avail this past offseason), and their offense relative to league average (-0.61 GPG) hasn’t improved much from last year’s -0.93 mark.
This wasn’t supposed to happen with a more experienced version of the generationally talented Bedard playing all 26 of Chicago’s games, surrounded by a better supporting cast on paper. But the new faces that were supposed to bolster the Hawks’ attack have sputtered out of the gates — Teravainen and Bertuzzi are on pace for just 35 combined adjusted goals and 70 adjusted points after having 44 and 92, respectively, last year — while Bedard has sort of stalled out. Here’s a comparison of his adjusted stats as a rookie and a sophomore:
Despite his “generational” reputation, Bedard already didn’t exactly blow us away with his rookie-year stats. (I made a joke with frequent commentator and Friend of the Newsletter
that I was glad I didn’t have to officially give Bedard the Caitlin Clark treatment last year as a hyped rookie with less incredible metrics than we might expect.)1 But he was just 18, went through a midseason injury, and ended up with the eighth-most adjusted points of any rookie his age in NHL history.It wasn’t unreasonable to expect a big bump in those stats this season. But his adjusted goals have gone backwards despite his famously hard and quick-released wrist-shot skills. His shooting percentage is down from 10.7 percent as a rookie (which already ranked just 111th out of 183 qualified shooters) to 7.4 percent this season. Though it’s hard to imagine that a player as gifted at shooting as Bedard would convert at such a low clip for very long, his lack of scoring in 19.5 minutes per night has contributed to the Hawks’ ongoing power outage on offense overall.
And in turn, this seems to have spelled the end of Richardson’s tenure behind Chicago’s bench. Richardson drew plenty of criticism, for instance, around how he deployed his offensive weapons, arguably trying to develop Bedard’s two-way game before he was ready for that shift.
Maybe Chicago’s next coach — starting with interim leader Anders Sorensen, called up from the AHL — can squeeze a lot more results from the potential of Bedard and the rest of the Blackhawks, whose roster didn’t look this horrible just a few months ago.
Filed under: NHL, Hockey, Hockey Bytes
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