Now that the Leafs are 1/3 of the way into the 2013-14 season, I thought it'd be a good exercise to look at seasons past to see how this Leafs team is doing comparatively.Thanks to the handy dandy stats sheets I keep here, that's pretty easy to do.
| Season | GP | Pts | W | L | OTL |
| 2011-12 | 27 | 32 | 15 | 10 | 2 |
| 2012-13 | 27 | 31 | 15 | 11 | 1 |
| 2013-14 | 27 | 31 | 14 | 10 | 3 |
Well that's pretty disconcerting since the 2011-12 team finished 26th, and the 2012-13 team took a hard nose dive towards the end of the season which saw two points separate 5th from 8th place. (Leafs currently only 4 pts above NJD for the last wildcard spot.) So how do the seasons look in terms of counting stats?
| Season | SF | SA | GF | GA | SH% | SV% |
| 2011-12 | 766 | 845 | 84 | 86 | 10.97 | 0.898 |
| 2012-13 | 740 | 864 | 81 | 73 | 10.95 | 0.919 |
| 2013-14 | 712 | 969 | 72 | 68 | 10.11 | 0.930 |
That's even more disconcerting. Shooting is slightly down and the Leafs incredible puck luck from last year is coming back to Earth, but the big issue is the shots against. An extra 100 shots against only 27 games into the season? Ridiculous. This Leafs team may be the one of the all-time worst "defensive" teams in the modern era.
Lastly, what about special teams?
| Season | PPGF | PPOpp | PP% | PKGA | PKOpp | PK% |
| 2011-12 | 23 | 102 | 22.55 | 23 | 103 | 77.67 |
| 2012-13 | 18 | 100 | 18.00 | 14 | 87 | 83.91 |
| 2013-14 | 19 | 82 | 23.17 | 22 | 103 | 78.64 |
I thought the PK woes were solved last year with the addition of McClement and Tyler Bozak who's a PK guru? Or maybe it's just that the early game PKSV% of the goalies have come crashing back to Earth since earlier in the season and the fact that the Leafs are 26th in the league in terms of PKSA/60 isn't helping in that record at all.
So with those three graphs and information, the question JP posted over the weekend seems like a no brainer: this is no better than Leafs teams of the past. On paper, no doubt this group of individuals is better, but on the ice they are horribly used by their coach and so the total of the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Oh joy.
What does these numbers tell you about the team?
