For the eighth season in a row, the Maple Leafs have punched their ticket to the postseason dance after Washington’s loss to Carolina on Friday night.
It’s easy to take for granted in Toronto with only the one game won beyond the first round of the playoffs, but the Matthews-era Leafs are tied with only one other team, the Boston Bruins, for the longest active streak of playoff appearances (eight). That’s a season longer than the Avalanche and Lightning.
X – Maple Leafs clinch a playoff spot for the eighth straight season
Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Morgan Rielly & Auston Matthews have played in all 50 playoff games in this era
— Mark Masters (@markhmasters) April 6, 2024
Currently on a 104-point pace, the 2023-24 Maple Leafs were not as straightforward of a playoff bet during the calendar year 2023. On the one hand, it’s disappointing they weren’t a divisional playoff spot shoo-in as of Christmas as in past seasons. Viewed in another light, when we consider the following adverse developments, it’s impressive we’re talking about a roughly 105-point Leafs team that safely clinched with two weeks left in the regular season:
– The Leafs are sixth in the NHL for the most man games lost to injury
– A hip injury debilitated their biggest FA addition on defense and almost immediately placed him on Long Term Injured Reserve to start the new campaign
– Their biggest forward UFA additions, Tyler Bertuzzi and Max Domi, started the season with six goals in 51 games and zero goals in 21 games, respectively.
– Their starting goaltender — the one who led them to their first playoff series win since 2004 last spring — started the season 5-2-6 with a .862 save percentage and ended up on waivers after Christmas.
– At the same time as the bottoming out and waiving of Ilya Samsonov, the team’s 1B goaltender, Joseph Woll, was out for nearly three months with a high-ankle sprain.
– Mitch Marner missed 15% of the regular season due to injury.
– Morgan Rielly missed nine games due to injury and suspension (though the act that drew the suspension was arguably a season-turning point).
– Calle Jarnkrok, who scored 20 goals for the team last season, is going to finish the season with fewer than 55 games played.
– TJ Brodie, who has been relied on for significant minutes against the other team’s best players for the past three seasons, has regressed to the point where he has been a healthy scratch for multiple games recently.
– The team’s only right-handed defenseman after the John Klingberg injury and prior to the Ilya Lyubushkin addition, Timothy Liljegren, has missed 25 games and counting due to injury.
It speaks to a couple of (obvious) things that don’t really need explaining but are worth appreciating nonetheless: 1) First and foremost and above all else, their elite star players who are driving the bus are really, really good drivers of the bus. 2) After an iffy start, Sheldon Keefe is arguably in the midst of his best stretch of (regular) season coaching in Toronto. He helped guide the team back to a reasonable (though imperfect) defensive structure despite concerning lottery-territory defensive results before the new year. The team currently sits at the top of the league in five-on-five offense, and there has been a ton of mixing and matching up and down the lineup due to injuries and illnesses while the team also integrated four first-year players into the lineup on many nights.
Just as some of the criticism was warranted for the Klingberg signing and the generally slow starts of his key FA additions, there is also some credit due to GM Brad Treliving for the additions of Martin Jones (disincentivizing a waiver claim with the contract structure), Simon Benoit, the much-improved second halves of Bertuzzi, Domi and Reaves (misgivings about the latter’s contractual terms aside, for now), and so far — as a premature statement — solid returns on the Ilya Lyubushkin and Connor Dewar deadline additions.
The team has some holes — special teams are a concern ahead of the playoffs, and in the summer, the defense requires major surgical intervention from management — but the Leafs are in the mix with the six tightly competitive teams in the East who have a credible case for making a deep run at it this season. Strap yourselves in for another spring of playoff hockey in Toronto.
