Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes in the Leafs roster, by counting stats

Welcome to Staturday, the column where we talk about stats on Saturday. Today, we’ll get into an overall look at last year’s team totals vs. what the 2021-22 roster did in 2020-21. Basically, we’re going to see if the Leafs should expect to have more or less of all of the basic counting stats. By doing so, we’ll see in what areas the 2021-22 roster should be better or worse than the 2020-21 roster.

I approached this same concept via the Goals Above Replacement model by Evolving Hockey in a previous Staturday column, so check that out here.

All of the stats below will be from Evolving Hockey, and will be at Even Strength, with no adjustments.

We can see that the Leafs were above the league average in all of the expected categories: goals, shots, expected goals, shooting percentage, giveaways, and takeaways. They’re also below average in hits, and penalty differential,  which would have been expected. In no way do the stats above surprise.

Let’s now compare these to the 2020-21 stats for the players who will compose the 2021-22 roster.

One important thing to note before we dig into this is that Ondřej Kaše is not shown below because he didn’t have enough ice time to meet the 50 minute cutoff. It’s impossible to predict exactly how Kaše will perform this coming year, but it’s obvious that he will add something to the totals/averages below. It also doesn’t include Josh Ho-Sang, who the Leafs have on PTO, and Brennan Mennell, for the same reasons, though their expected impact is much less than Kaše’s, if they even play for Toronto in the NHL.

So, as expected without one of their top-9 forwards, the Leafs take a bit of a drop off from last year. If you look at the differences, there’s a few categories where we can expect Kaše to make up the difference and more. In goals, shots, fenwick, and corsi, it won’t be surprising at all if Kaše eclipses the negative difference shown above.

In shooting percentage, it would be very difficult for him to drag the team up by much, but he could easily get them to the same 8.5% they showed last year.

For blocks and hits, since Kaše isn’t much of a physical player, I wouldn’t expect him to close that gap.

Overall, the Leafs should expect to improve in the number of goals they score, the pucks they put on net, and their penalty differential and faceoff differential. They should expect to have a lower shooting percentage, a similar amount of expected goals, and less hits and shots blocked (not considering that they’ll play 82 games next year instead of 56).

Do we worry at this point? Certainly not. In more ice time for Michael Bunting, less ice time for David Kämpf, the effect of an at-least-somewhat-healthy Ondrej Kaše, I don’t think they will actually perform as bad as this tabulation shows. However, it’s interesting to note that there are some areas of potential concern, like shooting percentage, which will be something to watch as the season goes on.

This analysis also ignores the changes in goal, where we expect that Petr Mrazek will have a positive impact in replacing Frederik Andersen.

In summation, it’s hard to say if this is really what to expect, but it seems that the Leafs will be similar to last year, with perhaps a slight improvement. Interestingly, this is the same conclusion that I came to when I looked at this through the Goals Above Replacement model, which I linked to above.