Looking at the Leafs Controlled Entries

Our good friends over at Oilersnation occasionally get their hands some pretty neat proprietary data that we don’t get a chance to see in the wild too often, and today they had an article featuring some controlled entry data from SportsLogiq. If you are interested in reading the full summary of the data, you can check out their post below…

If you are here for the Leafs centric look at the numbers, we’ve got you covered here. If you’ve taken a glance at the original Oilers Nation post, you’ll see that I’ve jazzed up the numbers below with rate stats to give it a bit more perspective as well…

So at a first glance, I’d say the Penguins are likely a team that looks at Controlled Entries and puts a lot of stock in them. Additionally, I’d say that I was a bit surprised to see that Marner fared well in this regard, and that he was right in there with @William Nylander and @Auston Matthews when looking by rate instead of count.

The fact that Tavares, Hyman, Kerfoot were as low as they were might speak to why Tavares might have struggled more this year, as the line could have benefited from a second strong puck carrier on the other wing to offset that Tavares wasn’t carrying the puck into the zone himself. A case can be made that Johnsson or Mikheyev are better suited to play him with Hyman or Kerfoot, but when you consider how Kapanen and Tavares didn’t work either it’s a reminder that there’s more to this than looking at one stat in isolation.

I’m legitimately surprised by @Denis Malgin doing as well as he did in this regard, and while I noted above that going all in on one stat isn’t ideal, part of me wants to explore the idea of Malgin as a thirteenth forward at the very least and give him an extended look as a Leaf.

The data shared by Jason Gregor in his post was limited to players with 100 controlled entries, and as such we don’t have data for the other Leafs forwards, nor do we have it for @Evan Rodrigues.

Just to put some of this data in context, we’ll take a look at the top 20 players in Controlled Entries per 60 around the league…

Kasperi Kapanen was ranked 37th in the league in controlled entries per 60, and Auston Matthews was 54th.

The names on the list are a lot of the players you’d expect to see on the list, but peppered with mild surprises like @Vincent Trocheck, @Blake Coleman, and @Andre Burakovsky

In taking a look at some of the unrestricted free agent options available at forward this summer, it looks like @Wayne Simmonds might be one of the stronger options available although none of the names I cherry picked are coming off strong a season with strong controlled entry rates…

It would be interesting to see this data split out from the Babcock and Keefe eras as there is a chance that the numbers might be more exaggerated under Keefe than the much more conservative coaching style of Babcock. As with most things context is key, and if looking at Controlled Entries in isolation can’t tell a full story. One of Gregor’s findings was that the Avalanche were the leaders with having 12 players exceed 100 controlled entries, the Leafs sat at 11 players, perhaps this is speaking to entering by committee rather than relying on the star players to handle the workload themselves. Gregor also notes that Patrice Bergeron only had 85 controlled entries last season, so using this as a measure of success for forwards or the success of a line might be ill advised.

The controlled entry numbers are an interesting piece of information to tuck into your back pocket and pull out to look at other data, but it’s still nice to see strong numbers from Matthews, Marner, and Nylander nevertheless.