Adjusted Toronto Maple Leaf Fenwick numbers

 
Remember the name 

A player’s Fenwick number is an advanced +/- statistic that counts all goals, misses and shots fired at the opponent’s teams net subtracted by the number of goals, misses and shots fired at your own net when you are on the ice. It corresponds well with scoring chances and is a good indicator of which team owned the bulk of quality shots when the player was on the ice. It is a variant of the corsi statistic, except with the blocked shots going either way excluded.

I downloaded and calculated the data for all 30 NHL teams and 891 players from last season. This post is dedicated to the Leafs numbers.

By copying and pasting some numbers off of Gabe Desjardins’ fantastic Behind The Net website and by using knowledge from Vic Ferrari that demonstrates each zone start is worth .6 of a Fenwick event, I seperated the events both “for” and “against” when a team was on the ice. These numbers may have some worth in debating both offensive and defensive superiority. Another number was generated for the number each player showed per game.

These numbers only account for 5-on-5 play.

 

 

The obvious takeaway is that Mikhail Grabovski was the best two-way player on the Leafs last season and that has hardly been debated. Joffrey Lupul is at the bottom, but keep in mind his number is based a lot on his play in Anaheim this past season. The remainder of the first line is there, and it’s clear that the Leafs will need to find some way to keep a positive shot differential while Kessel is on the ice. There’s no use in scoring 30 goals if you allow 40 while on the ice, you may as well pick up a player who doesn’t create a lot of chances for shots at either end. That said, I think that the problem was more “Kessel is playing with AHLers for most of the season” than “Kessel is weak defensively”.

 

Also, play Mike Zigomanis more. 

Not only was the oft-criticized Mike Komisarek not the worst defenseman on the Leafs, but he had the lowest number of adjusted Fenwick events against and the highest adjusted Fenwick among defenseman. Without a single positive player in the group, you can see why Brian Burke might have changed around the defensemen.

As you can see, all three will jump in and become better-than-average on the team, despite being negative players per game. Tim Connolly’s superior defensive numbers might bring Phil Kessel closer to average and keep the play in the opposing end a little bit more. Kessel’s offensive skill is apparent, he just needs the help keeping in the zone. Clearly that was not being done with Tyler Bozak last season. On first glance, the defense looks pretty good, and Cody Franson’s zone-start ratio is much closer to 50 than you’d expect from an offensive defenseman. He’s a player who won’t necessarily lose a shot-differential battle by enough of a factor to be a liability. It’s a pickup I quite like for the Leafs, and they now have quite a bit of firepower from defense that will translate to a few extra powerplay goals. The defensive numbers need to slightly improve and take a bit of the pressure off of James Reimer, since he’s a) unproven [dodges shoe from PPP] and b) without a capable backup.

Matthew Lombardi’s numbers really lack the sample size to be really given any merit, but I included him anyway for curious eyes.