Where in the NHL standings will the Leafs finish this season?

Fall has arrived, training camp is in full swing, now it is time for all longstanding Leafs fans to torture ourselves by predicting where the team will finish in the overall standings for the upcoming NHL season.

It is fair to suggest that attempting to predict where any team will finish in the standings before a season has even begun is a fool’s errand. Yet, seemingly every year, and despite the inevitable dismal track record of almost never coming anywhere close to getting it right, we are at it again.

There are many different ways these types of predictions can be made. Most times we will look at the previous year’s standings, consider what offseason roster changes have been made, then let our unflinching favourite team bias completely cloud our thinking to come up with an unrealistic jump upwards in the standings. Does this sound familiar?

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Throwing darts at a board representing the standings, or having a monkey spin a wheel would probably be just as effective. Sometimes we even swear off of making these types of pointless predictions, vowing to not frustrate ourselves in this manner again, but it never seems to last very long.

I’ve learned over the years to simply use ranges in the standings for my guesses. Last year for example, I predicted a bottom five Leafs finish. Yeah, I know, way to go out on a limb with that one, but who could really have predicted what last season’s rag tag roster sans Phil Kessel was going to do?

There were times not so long ago where my predictions were anything but realistic and almost always involved the Montreal Canadiens finishing lower in the standings than the Leafs, such are the effects of decades long rivalries and home team wishful thinking.

It is little wonder I never got it right using that method.

For this upcoming season, I was challenged by one of my readers to make a case for what the Leafs finish would look like during the first year of Frederik Andersen in net and at the beginning of an era in team history that will feature Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Nikita Zaitsev et al.

Again I will use a range in the standings to suggest the Leafs could realistically be picking as low as 10th overall at the 2017 NHL entry draft. This means a finish as high as 20th overall in the standings in what is the last year of a 30-team league. I would go as far as to say the leafs could finish anywhere in the range of 20th to 23rd overall, improving their draft position to as high as seventh overall.

Following is how I am making my case:

Every year we will hear someone suggest all of last year’s playoff qualifying teams have made improvements to some degree and there is no reason to expect any of them to falter, but a few always do. Another common sentiment is the notion that a perennial contender just missing the playoffs for the first time in awhile, as the Bruins did last season, is an aberration. If any team other than the previous season’s incumbents claim a playoff spot this year, it will be them.

We need only look at the logjams at all positions heading into Leafs training camp to appreciate the level of difficulty of our fool’s errand. Not only do we not have a good idea of what a lot of the roster will look like on opening night, the players who do secure the few available and highly contested roster spots have to learn to play with each other. It would be unrealistic to expect the re-tooled Leafs to come flying out of the gate without at least some growing pains to start the season.

These realities alone solidify suggestions of the prophetic nature of Mike Babcock’s now mantra-like statement from 2015, where he glibly offered that “There will be pain”

To suggest a team will finish around 20th overall, they simply have to accumulate more points in the standings than nine other teams in the league (Duh) but what teams can this year’s Leafs outperform?

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As tempting as it is, I’m not going to list the teams they might overtake in the standings – instead, I want to take a different approach. Last season, in a tally that I came up with entirely by my own reckoning, the leafs lost seven games they could have easily won with better goaltending (three for Garret Sparks, three for Jonathan Bernier and one for James Reimer, if you must know).

There were of course, other points squandered in a variety of different ways last season by the Leafs, but these 14 points give us something to work with.

My prediction requires the 2016-17 Toronto Maple Leafs to accumulate the equivalent number of points as winning seven more games than they did last year.

With a record that is 14 points better than their 2015-16 finish of 69, the Leafs will finish the season with 83 points, or thereabouts. Yeah, I know this conclusion is premised upon a glaring non sequitur but allow me this, 14 points seems like a reasonable number.

It is not a grandiose claim of say 30 or 35 points, which would put the Leafs nipping at the heels of a playoff spot. If anything can be said about pulling a number out of the air in this manner, it is that it represents an effort to manage expectations, to be realistic.

This also takes into account how this season may unfold.

Sep 18, 2016; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Team North America center Auston Matthews (34) skates without the puck against Team Finland in the second period during preliminary round play in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey at Air Canada Centre. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Sousa-USA TODAY Sports /

There will be a lot of new players learning the system, their roles and the tendencies of a lot of other new players.

No one in all of Leafdom expects another dead last finish in the league this season. In light of a general consensus of at least some improvement, I contend my number is as good as any. Make it 12 points or 15 points if you prefer, it does not matter a great deal when speaking in terms of a range in the standings.

Instead of comparing rosters for each NHL organization, let us streamline this process and simply look at the teams that finished last season with fewer points than the Leafs projected 83 points for this season.

In the West:

Colorado Avalanche – 82 points
Winnipeg Jets – 78 points
Arizona Coyotes – 78 points
Calgary Flames – 77 points
Vancouver Canucks – 75 points
Edmonton Oilers – 70 points

In the East, the story will be a bit different, as the Leafs, by virtue of more head to head match-ups, have more control over their own fate. Again, last year’s standings compared to this year’s 83-point projection for the Leafs.

Montreal Canadiens – 82 points
Buffalo Sabres – 81 points
Columbus Blue Jackets – 76 points

As illustrated below, an 83 point season would have secured the following overall standings for the previous seasons

2015-16…20th overall
2014-15…23rd overall
2013-14…22nd overall
2011-12…22nd overall

Another way to look at it is to ask where would 14 additional Leaf points come from? There are teams in both the East and West that will suffer from inexplicable rough starts, key injuries and other forms of bad luck. Of course we are hoping the Leafs are not one of these unlucky teams.

There are also teams in the league who are inevitably going to experience the beginning of a less successful era when compared to previous years. I see the Red Wings as one of those teams. Minus Pavel Datsyuk, with an aging/ailing Henrik Zetterberg and question marks throughout their line up, they could yield a few extra points to the Leafs this season.

How about the Senators, Devils, Bruins or Habs? Could there be an extra handful of points taken from those teams over totals from last season? I think so but the final aspect of my not so scientific prediction is coaching, as in Babcock himself. He simply won’t stand for another abysmal season and will coach up whatever group the Leafs ice this year to better results than last season.

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To summarize: I am predicting a 14-point improvement in the Leafs’ total this season and despite this number being arrived at in a dubious manner, I am using it to justify a “somewhere in the neighborhood of” a 20th overall league finish in the standings by the Leafs during the 2016-17 season.

Fool’s errand complete, what method do you use to make your predictions? How good is this emerging team and what will the Leafs finish look like this year? These are all questions that we can have a little bit of fun with as we endure our team’s growing pains.

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