The Maple Leafs have 45 points in 41 games. Keeping up this underwhelming pace that’s a 90 point season and you’d have to go back to 2018-19 to see a team with 90 points make the playoffs. The team is very much on the bubble and while a 4-0-2 record in the post-Marc Savard era shows a team is trending in the right direction, but a tight schedule, the impact of the Olympics, and the approach to the trade deadline will all have impacts on what is a lineup card notably worse than last season and now coming to terms with Chris Tanev’s long-term injury.

Here are some numbers from the first half of the season that outline how the Leafs got here, and how they can find their way out.

27.1 vs. 31.3

This isn’t a trend limited to the first half of this season but rather the overall trend of Leafs hockey under Craig Berube. The Leafs get outshot. A lot. And while the 27.1 shots for per game isn’t ideal either given the high end offensive players on the roster, it’s the 31.3 shots against per game that are truly damning. This season they are the worst team in the league for shots allowed and only the Sharks and Blackhawks have a worse shot differential.

The hope would be that if the Leafs are sacrificing some offence there would be some kind of trade of for better defensive hockey and that isn’t the case, the Leafs just enjoyed some great goaltending last season and slightly better defensive results that come from a healthy Chris Tanev, and a few more defensive minded players in the lineup.

The question is how do the Leafs fix this. When it comes to the shots against, with Tanev out of the lineup, the answer is they probably don’t improve much in this regard. Instead, the trade off should probably be embracing that if they are a bad defensive team, they should likely try to be more offensive. un the short term, playing to the strengths of the lineup seem like the best way out of this.

16.7 percent

That’s the Leafs’ power play conversion rate after Game 41. It’s not pretty, but it’s improved a lot in a short time considering when Marc Savard was fired on December 22, the Leafs were sitting at 13.3 percent, dead last in the NHL.

Steve Sullivan’s reign as powerplay coach has yielded a 41.7% success rate and while that isn’t particularly sustainable, it is a sign that one of the worst parts of the Leafs game in the first half can be better with personnel they already have in place.

A perfectly reasonable place for the Leafs to end up is around the 25 percent mark and if they get that in the second half that can be enough of a difference maker to pick up the extra couple of wins the Leafs will need to be a playoff team.

A big part of what the Leafs have under Steve Sullivan is a simpler system that trusts the players’ skill level. For now, the absence of predictable zone entries and slow games of catch create some optimism about the next 41 games.

41 vs. 46

These are the goals for and against for the second period. It’s the only Leafs period with a negative goal differential and shows that the slower Leafs are struggling with the long change.

That’s the overall narrative and is largely driven by the results at home with a -4 differential there in the second period compared to just a -1 on the road.

What is interesting is the split when you look at the third period. The third period is generally positive for the Leafs with a +5 differential but that stems from a +14 differential at home. The -9 on the road speaks to a team that struggles against a team with the last change at the time when they want to apply the most pressure. And given the previously mentioned issue for the Leafs around playing defensive hockey, perhaps this is a lesson to not take the foot the gas offensively as Toronto’s bench shortens radically if they stick to exclusively defensive capable players.

.895 vs. .905

This season’s save percentage vs. last season.

Joseph Woll is a model of consistency but hasn’t been healthy. Dennis Hildeby is still figuring things out in the NHL and consistency is a challenge. The Cayden Primeau experiment was a disaster. And while it would be nice to say that Anthony Stolarz’ injury is what has held the Leafs back, his results to start the season might make it hard to play him ahead of Hildeby, although it’s unlikely that his struggles would continue at the level he started the year at.

Health is a big concern, for Woll and Stolarz. And the Leafs having to come to terms with that goaltending may not be the source of strength it was last season.

More than anything else the Leafs need to survive on the serviceable results the team is getting from Woll and Hildeby until the Olympic and then appreciating that they’ll get rest and there is a chance for Stolarz to get healthy. Suddenly having three capable goaltenders for the final stretch of 25 games makes the position seem like a source of strength again, assuming it plays out that way.

54.26 vs. 60.61 vs. 68.26

Tanev vs. McCabe vs. Carlo’s Corsi Against/60

Tanev’s on ice defensive results will be missed in the remainder of the season and that is heavily illustrated by the numbers above. McCabe simply doesn’t suppress opportunities the way Tanev does despite McCabe being a strong defenceman. No one allows fewer goals against at 5v5 than Tanev either. And as you can see by the numbers above, believing that Brandon Carlo is in anyway going to be an answer for the Leafs is purely wishful thinking.

The Leafs have been fortunate enough that Troy Stecher has been outstanding. Being able to trust Stecher in the top four has been a big part of why the Leafs aren’t fully committed to the draft lottery at this point. And the resurgence of Oliver Ekman-Larsson obviously hasn’t hurt either. The question around both of those players will be if they can keep it up for the remaining 41 games and depending on where Toronto is at, whether they should look at fixing their blueline at the deadline. (A little subtraction instead of addition might not hurt either.)

41 vs. 40

Nylander’s 41 points in 33 games vs. Mitch Marner’s 40 points in 40 games.

With return games against Mitch Marner coming up in the next few weeks, it doesn’t hurt to take a look at how the current Leafs are doing compared to the former Leaf.

Marner is just a point per game player and you’d have to go back to his second season in the league to see him producing that low. It’s even questionable that he’ll be a 20-goal scorer this season. There’s something about those numbers that are comforting and when you look at Knies picking up more assists and the results from Nylander and Tavares being steady, the fact that Marner isn’t a Leaf anymore is less of an offensive concern and more of the Leafs missing Marner’s regular season defensive play.

The issue with Marner’s absence but how he was replaced. And that will get looked at in the next stat.

46 points in 127 games played

Combined points and games played of Laughton, Roy, Joshua, and Maccelli.

That’s not to say that they were meant to be direct replacements for Mitch Marner and the whole benefit of moving on was supposed to be about trying something new with the lineup but that being said:

Matias Maccelli has been a regular healthy scratch and has only recently started showing his offensive abilities. He’s had some memorable defensive brain farts this season but given that he’s still on the younger side of his career the Leafs should want to make things work with him.
Nicolas Roy was to be the defensive centre that could possibly add some offensive elements to his game in the right situations and instead the Leafs have just undone his defensive attributes. Roy is a player that is worth hanging onto because if there is any possibility that someone other than Craig Berube is coaching the team next season, Roy might be a player that new coach wants to work with. Still, like Maccelli, there was no magical offensive output coming out of the blue.
Dakota Joshua had a fun 2023-24 where everything went in the net and that has masked that he is a really good fourth liner that can step up when he’s on a hot streak. The Leafs treating him as a third liner didn’t work so well and now getting a bit more of a pressure off role as an expensive fourth liner is actually getting better hockey out of him.
Scott Laughton might not be one of the Leafs offseason acquisitions but after a short hot streak after his return from injury, he’s very much in the same boat as Dakota Joshua and found comfort in his fourth line role and demonstrating that hot streaks and third line utilization was very aspirational.

There might not have been much available this summer but the Leafs decision to collect players that could potentially turn things around after struggling seasons hasn’t worked out particularly well. It might not be an easy thing to do but landing a bona fide top line talent needs to be the ambitious plan for the front office in the offseason.