Who is the most impactful player on the Toronto Maple Leafs to this point of the 2023-24 season? William Nylander is having a career year and leads the team with 29 points in 22 games played. He is on pace to score 44 goals and 108 points this season. Auston Matthews has scored 16 goals. He is on pace to score 60 goals once again this season. On defence, Morgan Rielly is averaging over 25 minutes a game and is playing against the opposition’s best players. He is on pace to score 60 points.
The Majority of NHL Hockey Is Played Five-on-Five
But what do the underlying numbers say? The vast majority of this game is played five-on-five. That is the way the game is designed to be played. That is the way most of the game has been played for over a hundred years.
For most of that time, only when a team did something illegal and committed a foul would the five-on-five play be altered. The penalized team had to spend time shorthanded. At some point in time the NHL, in the name of trying to decide games within a certain length of time, instituted the Shootout, four-on-four overtime, and more lately three-on-three overtime in the regular season. To this day, the sport’s main design is a game played at five-on-five.
The question then is who has been the best Maple Leafs’ players at five-on-five this season.
Different Ways of Judging the Maple Leafs Best Five-on-Five Player
There are two ways of judging five-on-five play. First is actual production by the players. If we look at five-on-five production, we see that Mitch Marner leads the team with 15 points. Matthews again leads the team in goals with eight and has one less point than Marner. Nylander drops to third with 12 points.
The second way of judging is to look at the “On Ice” statistics for each player. The idea of “On Ice” stats is that this is a team game. On every play, and every goal that is scored, each player on the ice has a job to do. In most cases, that player has some effect on the play and the outcome of a play. That player might or might not have touched the puck.
Goals Get Scored in Different Varieties
There are goals scored where every player on the ice for the team that scored the goal had handled the puck leading up to the goal. Other goals are unassisted, where the only player who touched the puck on the team that scored was the player who scored the goal.
There is also the role of each player on the team that gave up the goal played. Some players miss checks or arrive a stride too late in coming back affecting the goal being scored. Some players score goals are scored where a certain player on the ice did not play a part in it either positively or negatively. That player may have just stepped on the ice on a line change as the puck entered the net.
Over time all of those factors even out. Given enough data, it is generally accepted within the sport that a player’s “On Ice” statistics are an indication of that player’s overall effect on play, be it positive or negative.
On-Ice Statistics Are Kept About a Huge Variety of Categories
The website Naturalstattrick.com tracks underlying stats in many categories. These include Shot Attempts, Shots, Goals, Expected Goals, Scoring Chances, and High-Danger Scoring Chances. Numbers are compiled both offensively and defensively and then compared to come up with a percentage that represents the overall effectiveness of a given player. For example, a gifted offensive player might not have solid defensive numbers, but his positive offensive numbers compensate for his lower defensive stats giving him a positive number for his effectiveness in the overall play. Or they may not. His poor defensive stats may overcome his offensive numbers.
With the overall number being a percentage, it means that 50 percent is the breakeven number. Anything over 50 percent is a positive. Anything under 50 percent is a negative. The more over or under 50 percent a player is, the more positive or negative the effect that player is having when he’s on the ice.
One note of caution. Twenty-two games might seem like a good sample size. In the analytics community, it’s still looked at as a relatively small sample size. It is still a decent sample though.
Using Analytics to Find the Maple Leafs’ Best Player
Time to get to the point. If we look at the six Naturalstattrick.com categories we mentioned earlier (twelve actually because the final percentage is a comparison between offensive and defensive statistics), there is one player that ranks number one in all six categories.
Here is a breakdown of each category:
| Category | Percentage |
| Shot Attempts | 56.12% |
| Shots | 56.71% |
| Goals | 61.9% |
| Expected Goals | 63.11% |
| Scoring Chances | 62.09% |
| High Danger Scoring Chances | 66.94% |
The Surprising Top Maple Leafs Five-on-Five Player
According to five-on-five analytics, the best Maple Leafs player is Tyler Bertuzzi.