Maple Leafs Forwards 5-on-5 Production in 2021-22: Surprises

In this post, we’ll look at the overall scoring for the Toronto Maple Leafs forwards for the 2021-22 season. Here’s a chart of the scoring of the Maple Leafs’ 12 forwards, from highest scorer to lowest scorer.  

The above scoring is for all situations, even strength, power play, and penalty kill. While, in the coach’s eyes at least, players on the power play have earned the right to be there, it still gives them more overall opportunity to score and to pad their scoring totals. 

Using Five-on-Five Statistics to Reveal Production Value

For the most part, hockey is played at 5-on-5. Information on a player’s production at 5-on-5 can be a valuable tool for the general manager and the coach to rate a player’s performance.  

Related: Maple Leafs’ Trade for Coyotes Jakob Chychrun Makes Sense

With that in mind, we decided to look at, and rank, each of the Maple Leafs’ forwards production at 5-on-5 for last season. 

Observations from Studying Maple Leafs’ Scoring Production

There are a few interesting observations when you compare the two lists.  

First, Matthews and Marner are still one and two in scoring. At 5-on-5, Matthews was the league’s top goal scorer by a mile, 38 goals to Kyle Connor’s 28. He was also second in 5-on-5 points, six behind Johnny Gaudreau.

Marner was fifth in the league in 5-on-5 scoring while Bunting was sixth. That means that the entire first line was in the top six in 5-on-5 scoring in the league. No other team in the league has three players in the top 20 let alone three players on the same line in the top six.  

At 5-on-5 production, Bunting and Kerfoot both jumped ahead of Nylander and Tavares. Surprisingly, Kerfoot was the highest point getter on the second line over Tavares and Nylander. When you also look at plus/minus and see that Kerfoot was a plus-19 while Tavares was a minus-8 and Nylander a minus-9, it makes us question the idea that Kerfoot was the weak link on that line.

Maybe that’s why Maple Leafs’ General Manager Kyle Dubas values Kerfoot more than some think. 

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Much has been made of Mikheyev’s 21 goals in 53 games, which was the main reason he was rewarded with a four-year $19 million deal as a UFA. At 5-on-5, Engvall outscored Mikheyev 26 points to 19. We must consider that Engvall played 25 more games than Mikheyev did; however, if we look at points per game at 5-on-5, Mikheyev averaged 0.35 while Engvall averaged 0.33. That’s not a huge separation. Plus, Engvall is two years younger than Mikheyev. 

Kampf had as many points as Kase had at 5-on-5. Part of the reason was that Kase missed 32 games, a big chunk of that was due to another series of concussions Kase suffered. For Kampf, who was brought in for his defensive play, scoring 19 points at 5-on-5 was a bonus. 

Another interesting note is that Simmonds had more points at 5-on-5 than Spezza did. 

Maple Leafs’ Scoring By Lines

One other observation we made was the 5-on-5 scoring appears to be line-related. The top three players (Matthews, Marner, and Bunting) were the team’s top line. For most of the season Tavares, Nylander, and Kerfoot formed the second line, while Mikheyev, Kampf, and Engvall were the third line. Spezza, Simmonds, and Kase formed the fourth line. 

Related: NHL’s Top 5 Centers of the Decade

If we compare the 5-on-5 scoring for each of the four lines it looks like this.

In a recent post, we looked at the production of key Maple Leafs’ forwards compared to their cap hits. If we compare the production of each of the four lines with their combined cap hit, we see the following. [Note: For the purpose of this, we are going to show the percentage of the team’s salary cap that each line takes up instead of the dollar value.]

What that chart tells us is the Maple Leafs got amazing value for the production of the first line. The first line scored 46 percent of the goals and 44 percent of the points while taking up 29 percent of the team’s salary-cap hit.  

The bottom two lines were also very productive. The third line had 17 percent of the goals and 15 percent of the points for only 5.4 percent of the cap hit. The fourth line got 12 percent of the goals and 11 percent of the points for only 3.6 percent of the salary-cap hit. 

But, once again we come back to the second line being a problem for the Maple Leafs. The second line accounted for 25 percent of the goals and 29 percent of the points while taking up 26 percent of the team’s salary-cap hit. It seems every time we look at statistics for the forwards, be it actual production, or underlying analytics the second line comes up as a team weakness. 

Related: Maple Leafs News & Rumors: Bruins, Canadiens & Senators

With less than a month to go until training camp, it will be interesting to see if Dubas does anything to address that issue.

[Note: I want to thank long-time Maple Leafs’ fan Stan Smith for collaborating with me on this post. Stan’s Facebook profile can be found here.]

The Old Prof (Jim Parsons, Sr.) taught for more than 40 years in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. He’s a Canadian boy, who has two degrees from the University of Kentucky and a doctorate from the University of Texas. He is now retired on Vancouver Island, where he lives with his family. His hobbies include playing with his hockey cards and simply being a sports fan – hockey, the Toronto Raptors, and CFL football (thinks Ricky Ray personifies how a professional athlete should act).

If you wonder why he doesn’t use his real name, it’s because his son – who’s also Jim Parsons – wrote for The Hockey Writers first and asked Jim Sr. to use another name so readers wouldn’t confuse their work.

Because Jim Sr. had worked in China, he adopted the Mandarin word for teacher (老師). The first character lǎo (老) means “old,” and the second character shī (師) means “teacher.” The literal translation of lǎoshī is “old teacher.” That became his pen name. Today, other than writing for The Hockey Writers, he teaches graduate students research design at several Canadian universities.

He looks forward to sharing his insights about the Toronto Maple Leafs and about how sports engages life more fully. His Twitter address is https://twitter.com/TheOldProf