Confidence check: How Maple Leafs rate heading into the playoffs

TORONTO — After an off-season that saw the Toronto Maple Leafs fire their head coach and bring in a swath of new faces behind the bench, and a season that’s seen them with an overhauled D-corps, new starting goalies and new depth, the team is on track for 102 points, a year removed from putting up … 102 points.  

It reminds me of a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit where a racehorse, after running his ass off in a mile-long sprint, arrives at the finish line, which is back where he started, and says, “What did we do that for? We could’ve just stayed here, we’d have been first!” 

But in reality, 102 points is pretty damn good. And the team’s goal wasn’t to get back to where it was as regular season dynamos, its goal was to be different, with the pure focus being on playoff success. And while the Leafs are still entirely dependent on their same five highest-earning guys to have success, most teams are, and things around them has changed. 

So, the question is, how confident are fans that they can have success in the post-season? Or in this case, how confident am I? 

For “success” here, I’m using the conference final as a benchmark. Losing in the first round would be pure failure, while the third round would feel like success, and the second being something in-between that would depend on how it looked. 

So let’s talk confidence levels. I’ll break it down piece by piece, scored out of 100 using my proprietary model that combines video and statistical analysis, interviews, and vibes, which I’ve named OPINION (not an acronym). 

What’s not going to happen is the Leafs are not going to get stuck on two goals the entire first round en route to losing again. I’m very confident there. They certainly may lose, and they may get shut down at times, but that can happen (Florida was held to two or fewer goals eight times en route to winning the Cup last year).  

They’ve got three guys who’ve scored around 100 points in the league who are of prime age. They have some really good finishers past those names in John Tavares, Matthew Knies and Bobby McMann, even Nick Robertson, if he plays. Past that you’ve got guys who’ve scored in the league before in Calle Jarnkrok, Scott Laughton, even Max Pacioretty, if he’s healthy.  

They’ll have a few games where they shoot it in the net. 

NOW: I gave this only a 78 because I can’t avoid the truth that past results have been abysmal, and at times this regular season they’ve struggled to create. But with the temperature turned up and effort high, I’ll truly be surprised if they aren’t better offensively this post-season. The great players tend to find a way eventually. 

The Leafs allow one fewer high-danger chance against per game this season. In terms of rush chances against, they’ve gone from 18th in the league to eighth. Defence is a focus of their coach, and we haven’t even seen an extended run with this group plus Brandon Carlo, who has statistically been their best D-man since he’s joined the team in terms of expected goals and scoring chance numbers.  

Could it be that Morgan Rielly has found his partner, but this time one with term? 

The problem with their defence might be that it doesn’t create any offence, though that’s clearly not their priority. It would help if Rielly gets comfortable with Carlo and feels freer to rush up the ice. In the end, though, they have a way they want to play and the personnel to play it. Chris Tanev and Jake McCabe are one of the few best shutdown pairs in the NHL, and the Leafs finally feel like they’re finally capable of making offence hard to come by.  

This D-corps is extremely long. Carlo, Tanev, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, Philippe Myers, Simon Benoit, those guys average about six-foot-four, and even McCabe and Rielly are six-foot-one and 210 pounds-plus. It’ll be tough to find space against them.  

It’s worth noting too that this is mostly a defensively responsible forward group. Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are rock-solid there, and most of their bottom-six make defending their priority. 

Most people would probably think I’d rate them higher here, as they’ve been excellent, truly great all season long. But one guy has never started a playoff game (Anthony Stolarz) and the other guy just doesn’t have that long of a track record (Joseph Woll). 

That said, Woll has started in huge spots for the Leafs and has been tremendous in them. He almost stole the Boston series for the Leafs last season before getting injured (also a concern!) with just a few seconds left in Game 6 in 2024. 

I’d be leaning Woll as the starter, but would be comfortable either way. 

It’s not so much “Can Craig Berube coach?” because he’s won a Stanley Cup already. It’s, “Can he coach a roster that doesn’t suit his preferred way of playing?” This Leafs team just isn’t as heavy (in playing style) as is his preference. 

The Leafs’ underlying numbers are the worst they’ve been in the Core Four era, by a good distance, in terms of what they create and give up. Matthews and Rielly are struggling offensively. And yet, they’re on pace for the same team point total as last year, in part due to great goaltending, but you could credit some of that to the environment in front of them.  

It’s all been built with the aim of playoff success in mind. So, I’m withholding judgment here, as I do see a way his ideas translate to post-season success. But I go with 76, as I don’t feel great about their ability to adjust when need be, as they’ve done very little adjusting as this season has gone on.

The power play is seventh in the NHL at 25.3 per cent, sure, but you’ll forgive Leafs fans if they have PTSD from previous playoffs, where it’s repeatedly let them down. Yes, they have oodles of talent and, of course, can score power-play goals.  

And maybe their five-forward look is different, and will carry on their success rate, which would just mean they’d need to score just 3-4 goals over a series. But it’s declined every Core Four post-season but one, and so if we’re talking confidence, I wouldn’t say I feel awesome about it. 

Ironically, they’re worse here — 16th in the NHL at 78.4 per cent — but I feel better about it. The additions of Carlo and Laughton gave them two more players who can kill and do it well, and I suspect you might see a change in the weeks ahead with the Leafs. Of late, they’re using three pairs of forwards killing, spreading out the ice time a bit, as they have about seven forwards who can do it well. That should keep everyone more fresh, and there’s a reason PKs tend to beat PPs at the start of periods. It’s just an energy thing, and fresh killers can be dogged and annoying. All six Leafs D can kill penalties too, which is a luxury.  

They’re not a small team, and they have plenty of guys who won’t back down. But they’re not an intimidating team, and don’t really have a true heavy (which helped them in Luke Schenn’s year), and the guys who play the most — their core — aren’t going to suddenly fall in love with the rough stuff. They’re going to need to get in the right mental place to play in a way that makes them uncomfortable, at times. 

No, they don’t have a lot of playoff success on the roster, though two of their players did win the Cup just last year. But they’ve got plenty of experience seeing what’s kept them short of success in the past, and it should be clear to them what they’ve now got to do. They are no longer a young team on the way up. They’ve seen some things, and hopefully learned from them. 

Vibes, more than anything else, can change with the breeze. But let’s be honest that it’s been a strange, bad-vibes kind of year. Tavares was stripped of the “C,” and in Matthews’ first year with it, he’s been below his standard, at times hurt, at times absent, and mostly standoffish in interviews. Marner has been trying to get to free agency without making waves, but the storm came, and he’s not been very good since. The teams numbers are down, they’ve been outplayed by the league’s best teams, and it still feels like they’re trying to find “it.”  

Like I said, that can change now that their biggest road trips are over, the trade deadline has past, Matthews has recently taken a game over, and everything seems more settled. But tough to look at this season and say, “They seem to be having a blast.”  

This isn’t about adding all the ratings up and dividing it by the number of categories, as there’s a million things that go into a team’s likelihood of winning. I just can’t go all the way to 80 out of 100. I can see a way it all falls into place and works, it’s not impossible. Hell, win the division, and it would look a lot better. 

But, as it stands, the Leafs haven’t given fans more hope in this season than in years past. And because of that, confidence is just on the high end of middling. You just have to get hot at the right time and get some goaltending, that’s true. But more than in the past, it feels like they need to get hot, and that playing the way they’ve been playing for the past six months on its own won’t be enough to get through a pretty jam-packed Atlantic.