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Bad News for Leafs Fans (and Good News for Habs Fans)

I wanted to take a quick look at team Fenwick percentages with the score tied, at home (where shot overcounting may come into play) and on the road, where it's much less significant.

At any rate, the bad news is that the Leafs are dead last in the league on the road and 28th overall:

Team All Home Road Team All Home Road
van 54.0 53.8 54.3 nj 52.9 55.3 50.6
chi 54.5 55.1 54.1 bos 50.6 51.0 50.3
det 53.5 53.5 53.6 pho 50.6 51.8 49.4
mon 53.9 54.1 53.6 ott 48.4 49.2 47.5
cgy 52.2 51.1 53.1 fla 49.4 52.0 46.8
sj 52.3 51.9 52.6 nyr 49.6 52.6 46.5
nsh 52.8 53.1 52.5 nyi 46.1 45.6 46.4
cls 51.0 50.3 51.9 edm 43.1 41.2 45.2
stl 51.4 51.1 51.6 atl 48.1 50.9 45.2
la 51.8 52.1 51.6 ana 46.6 47.8 45.2
pit 54.2 56.6 51.5 min 44.1 43.6 44.6
buf 49.5 47.9 51.1 col 46.6 50.2 44.1
phi 53.9 57.1 50.7 car 45.2 48.5 42.8
was 50.0 49.5 50.6 dal 45.5 48.4 42.7
tb 53.0 56.1 50.6 tor 44.8 47.8 39.8

 

Montreal is shockingly good – #1 in the East.  It's pretty unlikely that they'll fall from the #6 seed in the conference.

Usual provisos apply: this doesn't account for goaltending, shooting talent, penalty drawing and taking talent, and PP shooting and PK shot-prevention talent.  And splitting the results into home and road increased the uncertainty of the Fenwick talent estimate.

Of course, none of this means that Toronto's results have been bad recently.  This chart is pretty illuminating:

Leafs_last_10_spct_medium

Toronto did well through the first 35 games or so – except their goaltending was poor and their own shooting percentage was low.  Both of those numbers tend to 8% in the long-run, so the Leafs have been running in good luck recently.  What about their fundamentals?

Leafs_last_10_chances_medium
So we have a number of different 5v5 indicators here that all point in slightly different directions:

Pct
Fenwick Tied 44.8
Goals 46.6
Fenwick 47.8
Chances 49.1

 

You'll have to pick your poison – chances point to an 8th playoff seed; Tied Fenwick points to a lottery team.  The real answer is somewhere in the middle, which means they'll want some very good luck going forward.

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