To answer the question of “how significant?”, we can use the Goals Above Replacement model developed by EvolvingHockey that we discussed in an earlier edition of Staturday.

Basically, EvolvingHockey put a bunch of statistics into a box, and figured out how many goals that would be worth, relative to what a “replacement level” player (i.e. a call-up from the minors just filling in) could do.

As a manager, Kyle Dubas will be hoping that each of his players has a positive Goals Above Replacement (GAR) season in 2021. But we don’t just have to hope; we can actually attempt to predict whether this will happen or not.

See, EvolvingHockey also developed an Expected Goals Above Replacement (xGAR) model to predict the results of the other model. This xGAR model uses only variables that we know to be predictive, that can indicate future positive results. This includes shot attempts,  The GAR model includes these, but it also includes things that really only represent present day positive results with no impact on future positive results.

So let’s see how the Leafs in 2019-20 did in GAR, and how the Leafs’ projected roster in 2021 did in xGAR, and see if there is an expected improvement as many would suspect.

How I’m going to work this out is as a total sum of the performances by each of the 2019-20 Maple Leafs who played at least 450 minutes in that season. Conveniently for us, this leaves us with 19 skaters as seen below:

Summing the GAR for the skaters above we get 97.1, and for WAR (Wins Above Replacement) we get 17.3. WAR is simply an extra calculation factoring how many goals it takes to get a win, so these numbers indicate the same exact performance data just in different ways.

To start, it’s easy to see that 5 players at the bottom 6 of this table have left the club in Andreas Johnsson, Tyson Barrie, Cody Ceci, Frederik Gauthier and Kasperi Kapanen. The 6th and lowest of the table was rookie Rasmus Sandin, who will undoubtedly improve on his debut season. Everyone above these in the table are staying on to next year. Perhaps Kyle Dubas saw this chart? Who can say.

Now, let’s take those 13 skaters above, plus the players that Toronto added in the offseason, and see how much better they will be. Unfortunately, we don’t have the data we need to include KHL exports Alexander Barabanov and Mikko Lehtonen, who the Leafs signed during last season for this upcoming season. It’s very difficult to say whether their impacts in the KHL will directly translate to success in the NHL, so we’ll leave this out for now. We’re also going to leave out rookie performances from Timothy Liljegren, and Nick Robertson last season, because they didn’t play enough time for the data to be worth drawing conclusions against. Typically this cutoff is 400-500 minutes; we used 400 minutes above so as to include Rasmus Sandin.

Luckily, the Leafs added so many other players to create depth for this upcoming season where players will be missing time for COVID-19 exposures and, hopefully not, COVID-19 infections. This allows us to still project a section of the roster to see what they’ll do.

In total, we have 18 skaters who had 400 minutes in the NHL last season who will be playing for the Leafs next season. Unfortunately, Joey Anderson and Zach Bogosian didn’t meet the cutoff, so they aren’t included.

Summing these 18 players in xGAR, we get 108.7 and in xWAR we get 19.5. In both cases this is a significant improvement.

So where are the big changes? Here is the comparison table:

In terms of the additions and subtractions, we see a large increase thanks to Tyson Barrie being replaced with TJ Brodie, healthy increases thanks to swapping Vesey/Kapanen and Thornton/Johnsson, and a minor decrease between Gauthier and Simmonds for a sum of +12.3 in GAR.

In terms of individual performances, there’s a lot of variance between the players who are sticking around this season, but the sum of positive and negative changes seems to mostly cancel out. We see Matthews, Nylander, and Sandin carrying a healthy positive difference, while Rielly, Kerfoot, Mikheyev, Spezza and Dermoot carry healthy negatives. This just means that the results that those players saw in the 2019-20 season are different than what the model expects to see in the future, based on their performance in the 2019-20 season.

In all, from the Goals Above Replacement model, we expect to see a better Maple Leafs team in 2021 than we saw in 2019-20. And again, this doesn’t factor in the performances of a number of players, especially including Mikko Lehtonen, who is likely to play as much as or more than Rasmus Sandin next season. I know that this isn’t the most exciting way to determine that the Leafs are better now than they were last year, but it’s encouraging that the data backs up what we all expected to be true. Ultimately, the proof will be in the pudding when the season begins on January 13th where we can finally see these new additions in action. Happy Staturday everyone!