I whipped this up in Excel, I thought it was a neat way to view the Leafs' season so far. The dashed line represents how many points the Leafs need to have to be in the playoffs. If we assume 94 points would let a team barely squeak into the playoffs in the Eastern conference, that's a 1.146 point per game pace. With 22 points in 23 games the Leafs are at 0.957 points per game. Here's a neat graph where the pace has been "corrected" to always be "0", so that the Leafs points in relation to that line show how easily into the playoffs they are, or how far out they are.

Leafsindex1201_medium

What that graph says is that 23 games into the season Toronto is already 4 points off the pace. They have 22 points but would need 26 to be the eighth team (which coincidentally would have them sitting in eighth after tie breakers).

This is pretty basic analysis, I just wanted to throw something up to show that the Leafs need to dig themselves out of a hole that's always getting deeper. Every game the Leafs win, they get 0.85 points closer to their pace, but every game they lose they drop 1.15 points off of it. A shootout or OT loss moves Toronto 0.15 points off their pace.