Toronto's Reliable Power Play is a Sign of Poor Defensive Play

One of my favorite things to do is look at random stats on NHL.com. One of the stats that I looked at was power play percentage and what I found shocked me.

Surprisingly, the Toronto Maple Leafs have the second best power play percentage in the league. If you haven’t heard this statistic yet, you’re probably as surprised as I was.

Let’s face the facts, Toronto has not been playing its best hockey this season. However, you usually don’t see a team with 3 wins at this point in the season have the second best anything.

What I was really surprised at was how well the Maple Leafs were doing on the power play this season. They have converted on 25% of their power plays.

This tells me that the problem with Toronto isn’t the offense. It has to be the defense. You don’t convert on 25% of your power plays with a bad offense. What a power play allows you to do is spend less time in the defensive zone and more time in the offensive zone, that’s obvious.

What isn’t obvious is that a power play can actually show you how good the offense of a team is. The same thing happens with the penalty kill. The penalty kill shows you how good a defense truly is. Special teams situations are the true tests of a team.

Since Toronto has a great power play this season, it’s a sign that their defense needs to be faulted for the many losses the team is facing this season. Also, if you take a look at the penalty kill numbers, you will see that the Maple Leafs have the worst penalty kill percentage in the league (71%).

These numbers can tell you a lot more than what a team is like in a special teams situation. Like I said before, special teams situations show how well specific parts of the team play.

Right now, the Maple Leaf offense is passing the test and the defense is failing. That’s the one thing a lot of people don’t understand, Toronto’s offense is actually pretty good, but their defense is their biggest problem.

That’s what they will have to fix if they want to win more games.