I love hockey stats. Does this make me a nerd? Probably, but I don’t care.
You can make some statistics in sports tell the story you want. I’m a sadistic person at time, so I’m going to go through some statistics which fully emphasise what an awful season it was for the blue and white and where it went horribly wrong in places.
#GloveTap to @TML_crystal for some of the following.
In total the Leafs lost 20 players for a total of 243 man games in 2011/2012. Perhaps more telling in this statistic is that 186 of those man games lost occurred before the turn of the year.
I need hardly remind you of the goal-tending issues the Leafs suffered last season, in fact I’m still trying to forget!
The four goalies to mind the net by the season’s end had only combined to play a total of 192 games in the NHL with zero play-off experience. James Reimer being the only one to have a winning career NHL record.
The Leafs finished 29th in Goals Against Average, 28th in Penalty Killing, 26th in 5 on 5 Goals/For Against Ratio and had a winning percentage of just .575 when scoring first.
I abhor the shoot-out but it plays a big part in hockey now. Nine of the Leafs games finished this way with a 4-5 final record. The goalies didn’t do bad saving 15 from 24 (.624) but the shooters left much to be desired with just 8 markers from 25 efforts (.320).
Read what you want into back to back game records but they can provide momentum or the opposite, during a season. Toronto played 17 of these and finished under .500 with a 14-4-16 record. More shocking is the record from February 28th – March 24th. In this period they played their last five back to backs of the season and had a record of 1-2-7 that included the vomit inducing 8-0 loss to Boston.
If there is a 2012/2013 it can’t be worse than this one right?
(see what a lockout does to me…..)
