The primary reason that hockey teams make trades is that they identify a change they’d like to make and they see some kind of swap of assets as the best way to accomplish it. It could be that they want to add some depth for the playoffs, or lower the amount of money they’re spending,…
[If you want the results without any preamble, jump past the first sub-headline.] Several years ago hockey analysts began using a statistic called Corsi to analyse team and player quality. While people have often called Corsi an “advanced statistic”, it’s really just the same idea as +/- but with a larger sample size; you add…
While hockey statistics work is often done with languages like R or Python that require a reasonable amount of programming knowledge to take advantage of, there are simpler tools that can be used to accomplish many tasks. I still use spreadsheets for a significant chunk of the stats work I do. However, managing data in…
In the summer before the 2014-15 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs did a great job of targeting potentially under-valued free agent forwards and signing them to low-cost, short-term contracts. Players like PA Parenteau and Brad Boyes had fallen out of favour with their old teams, but had a history of putting up solid numbers and…
At the moment the Toronto Maple Leafs are pretty thin on right-shooting defencemen. Nikita Zaitsev and Connor Carrick are the only two right-shot D in the organization who seem likely to make the opening night roster at the moment. The team could simply run a roster that’s heavy on left-shots, perhaps with a bottom pairing…
I think it’s fair to say that Matt Martin has been a polarising figure in Toronto this season. Unsurprisingly, the divide mostly seems to be between traditionalists who see Martin as a player who performs a valuable role protecting the Leafs younger stars versus more statistically-inclined fans who see Martin is a low-scoring player whose…
As the NHL playoffs start to wind down, attention is going to increasingly turn to the NHL draft and all of the player movement that tends to happen around that time of season. Where the Toronto Maple Leafs are concerned, the name that fans bring up most often as far as trade targets is James…
The Toronto Maple Leafs announced Tuesday that they had signed Nikita Zaitsev to a 7-year contract extension with a salary cap hit of $4.5 million per season, as Bob McKenzie had been reporting would happen since before the playoffs started. In his rookie campaign in Toronto Zaitsev clearly earned coach Mike Babcock’s trust, playing 22:01…
One of the questions that’s of interest heading into any playoff series is how the two head coaches are going to strategise in order to maximise their chances of winning. This obviously happens in the regular season too, but since a playoff series typically lasts several games against the same team, it gives coaches more…
The topic of how significantly Morgan Rielly is affected by quality of competition has been making the rounds recently. Rielly’s possession statistics this year have not been especially strong, as he’s currently just barely breaking even in terms of shot attempt ratio, 4th best on the team after Jake Gardiner, Connor Carrick, and Martin Marincin. …
You’ve probably heard by now that the Toronto Maple Leafs have an unusually talented crop of rookies. As of Monday night the Leafs had three of the four highest scoring rookies in the NHL, as well as three more in the top 15. But as much as the Leafs rookies have been talked about, I…
Embed from Getty Images With the 2016-17 trade deadline fast approaching, I thought it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane for a retrospective on the trades of the previous management regime. Dave Nonis was General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs for two and a half seasons, covering three trade deadlines. …
