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The Toronto Maple Leafs have known their share of pain in recent NHL seasons. Despite having a roster filled with elite NHL players, the Maple Leafs have known only frustration when it comes to playoff performances. While there are still several months before the postseason begins in the NHL, there is reason for the Toronto organization as well as the team's fans to believe that the 2024-25 season will be quite a bit different from past years.
The primary reason is the talent on the roster itself. The Maple Leafs offer stars like Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, John Tavares and Morgan Rielly as the key players on their roster. That allows the Maple Leafs to rank with the most talented teams in the league. Those players have been at the core of the team for years, and they now have a group of highly skilled supportive players around them.
The Leafs have also had a subtle change in philosophy that comes with the change at the head coaching position. After Toronto was eliminated in the first round last year by the Boston Bruins in overtime of the seventh game of their first-round series, head coach Sheldon Keefe was fired. The Leafs brought in former Stanley Cup-winning head coach Craig Berube to take his spot.
Berube knows he has has talented core players, but he wants those players to do as much on the defensive end as as they provide on offense. He also wants to see the Leafs play a more physical brand of hockey and deliver the kind of hitting game that they have often been victimized by in key games.
Marner, Matthews and Nylander prepared to lead the offense — as usual
The Leafs will always look to Auston Matthews for the bulk of their goal scoring. He scored a league-leading 69 goals last season, and while early-season injuries will prevent him from reaching that level this year, he is still a dynamic scorer.
Matthews has played just 16 games this year and his 8 goals and 8 assists are paltry by last year's standards. However, if he can stay healthy throughout Toronto's final 57 games, it seems quite likely that he could score 45 to 50 goals by the end of the regular season.
Marner has been having a sensational season for Berube, as he has potted 9 goals and added 27 assists for 36 points in 25 games. Marner is extremely creative with the puck and so is No. 2 scorer Nylander. He has 16 goals and 11 assists and is also one of the top power play threats in the league. He has already potted 6 goals when the Leafs have the man advantage.
Tavares was the captain of the Leafs but that honor now belongs to Matthews. Tavares has had a surprisingly strong start to the season with 11 goals and 11 assists, and he has already netted 5 game-winning goals.
Rielly has 4 goals and 11 assists from the blue line, and the Leafs would like to see a bit more from him as an all-around performer as he has a minus-3 rating through 25 games.
More than the star players, supporting player like Matthew Knies, Bobby McMann (lower body injury), Chris Tanev and Steven Lorentz are doing a solid job and are playing key roles in the team's 16-7-2 start that has them in first place in the tough Atlantic Division of the Eastern Conference.
Maple Leafs goaltending appears improved
The Leafs' goaltending appears quite a bit stronger than it has been in recent seasons. So far the Leafs have received solid netminding from Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll. In previous years, Toronto goaltending rarely measured up to their opponents. There appears to be quite a bit of improvement this season.
The combination of Stolarz and Woll have performed far above the standard that previous Maple Leafs goaltenders have provided in recent years.
Stolarz, who came over from the Florida Panthers in the offseason, has an 8-4-2 record along with a 2.23 goals against average and .924 save percentage. Woll has also played to a very high standard with a 7-2-0 record while compiling a 2.11 GAA and a .922 save percentage.
The Leafs are the only team in the league with a pair of goaltenders who each have a save percentage of .920 or better. The Leafs have a team save percentage that is .011 better than the average goaltending in the league, and that's one of the key reasons the team has so much more hope for the rest of the season than they have had in recent years.
If the Leafs can continue to depend on their goaltending, this could finally be the year that they could win multiple rounds in the postseason.
