Each day in the month of August we’ll be examining a different NHL team — from looking back at last season to discussing a player under pressure to focusing on a player coming off a breakthrough year to asking questions about the future. Today we look at the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were already one of the NHL’s most dynamic offensive hockey teams.
Even though they missed Auston Matthews, their best players, for 20 games last season, they still finished as the third-highest scoring team in the league with 270 goals. Not only will they — hopefully — be getting a full season out of Matthews in 2018-19, but they also went into free agency and snagged John Tavares to add to a roster that is already loaded.
It is not out of the question to think that this could be the best offensive team in hockey this season, something that the Maple Leafs have rarely had in their existence. It’s been two decades (1998-99) since the Maple Leafs finished as the NHL’s leading goal-scoring team, and it’s something that has only happened once in the post-Original Six era. Even during the Original Six era you have to go all the way back to the 1940s to find a Maple Leafs team that scored the most goals in hockey.
This team is capable of pacing the league.
Just look at what they have at their disposal going into the season. It is an embarrassment of riches at forward.
[Maple Leafs Day: 2017-18 Review | Under Pressure | Breakthrough | Three Questions]
— In Matthews, Tavares, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and Nazem Kadri the Maple Leafs have five of the top-70 players in points-per-game over the past two seasons. No other team in the league has more than four players in the top-70. All of those players will be age 28 or younger on opening night, while Matthews, Nylander, and Marner are all just now entering what should be their peak offensive years in the NHL. Those three were Toronto’s top point-producers this past season and not one of them had celebrated their 22nd birthday yet. It is not a stretch to think that all three of those players could improve on what they did this past season and be even better.
— Patrick Marleau may be 39 years old and closer to the end of his career than his prime, but he has still been a lock for at least 25 goals and 45 points over the past four years. He scored 27 goals (one of six players on the roster to score at least 20) during the 2017-18 season and was awesome (four goals in seven games) in the playoffs. He is still an excellent player.
— Along with the established, front-line, All-Star level talent, the Maple Leafs still have a collection of younger, cheaper players that can complement their top players on the scoresheet. Zach Hyman and Connor Brown are both capable of 15-20 goals for a combined salary cap hit of less than $5 million over the next two years. Kasperi Kapanen, one of the key pieces in the Phil Kessel trade from three years ago, showed signs of being an impact player last season.
In short, there really isn’t much of a weakness anywhere in the forward lines, while they also jettisoned probably the two weakest links offensively in Leo Komarov and Matt Martin this summer.
There are a lot of teams at the top of the NHL that have superstar talents and strong depth (Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, Washington, Winnipeg) but Toronto is really the only one that still has its most significant and impactful core players still in the prime of their careers, or just entering their prime with still having room to grow.
There is massive potential here for what this team could be capable of offensively and on any given night five or six goals (or more) is certainly possible. Will it result in a Stanley Cup this year or in future years? Odds are probably against them (that is just the nature of sports when it comes to betting one team against the field), but there may not be a more exciting team anywhere else in the league.
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Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.
