The Toronto Maple Leafs are once again going through a tough stretch on the power play, where they are struggling to maintain momentum on their opportunities.

Craig Berube and Marc Savard have tried just about everything to get it going in the right direction, but to no avail. They have loaded up the top unit with their star forwards, they have swapped Morgan Rielly and Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and they have even reverted back to the five-forward power play setup. All of this has led to a mere 10 goals with the man advantage, placing them dead-last in the NHL at the time of filing.

While teams go through slumps in all aspects of the game, the lack of production on the power play is a major concern and a major reason why the Leafs have struggled so far this season. It is the kind of thing that can define their season if it is not rectified quickly, and also inexcusable for a team blessed with as much talent as this iteration has at its disposal.

“The power play has got to come through for us and it didn’t,” Berube said after Saturday’s loss to the Montreal Canadiens, where his team went 0-3 on the night. “Right now, what I see when I watch it is that they’re very unsure of themselves. Particularly the power play in the second period, we moved it well, but we don’t take a shot. The shots are there and we’re not taking them. Then when we do take a shot, it’s probably the wrong time. They’re not feeling too good about themselves out there. Gotta work through it, that’s all you can do.”

Berube is fair to point to a lack of confidence as a factor in why the power play is not clicking at the moment, especially in regards to their shot selection. But the struggles have more to do with their setup being too predictable, along with a lack of urgency. This Leafs team has a difficult time drawing calls to begin with, and it should be imperative to take full advantage of the opportunities they do get instead of killing off the clock.

They aren’t doing a good enough job of gaining entry, extending time in the offensive end when they do get in, and sustaining pressure once they get into a rhythm. Their approach appears to be simply to wait for the perfect shot and only fire the puck when that presents itself, instead of forcing the issue by firing more pucks at the net. You can’t expect the power play to convert every single time, but you should at the very least have a sustainable process that is effective more often than not, and the Leafs don’t have that going for them with the way they operate on the man advantage.

It is clear that sticking with it and hoping that they eventually regress back to the mean is not a viable strategy because there are no indications that it is going to be the case. So if they want to raise their desperation levels, that means taking drastic measures for the construction of the power play setup by simply splitting up the stars and putting them on separate units.

Doing so will help in increasing their urgency because the pressure will be on each unit to earn the bulk of the ice time on each power play and gain the trust of the coaching staff. Healthy competition is never a bad thing, and this Leafs team has more than enough talent to build two strong units. You have a better chance of scoring when you have two balanced units instead of loading up on one that is struggling to get anything going.

The Leafs need to make a hard reset on their process, and the only way it can be achieved is by shuffling the deck with where each player is placed. Auston Matthews, William Nylander, John Tavares, and Matthew Knies need to be shuffled around on the two units and have the ice team allocated about evenly. You could certainly try and keep riding it out and hoping it eventually starts to click, but the Leafs have been waiting for that to happen for nearly two months and have nothing to show for it.

Here is a proposal for how the power play units could look with the star players split up:

Unit 1

Oliver Ekman-Larsson

Auston Matthews-Nicolas Roy-Max Domi

Matthew Knies

Unit 2

Morgan Rielly

William Nylander-Easton Cowan-Nick Robertson

John Tavares

The Leafs would be doing themselves a disservice by not taking a drastic measure to improve their power play setup because the status quo isn’t working. Banking on it to correct itself over time has blown up in their face, and they run the risk of it sinking their season if they don’t do something about it before it’s too late. Simply put, the Leafs need to take matters into their own hands by splitting up the star players on the man advantage.

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