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How the Maple Leafs' penalty kill could unlock another weapon

Just a few minutes into the Maple Leafs’ Tuesday night loss to the Winnipeg Jets Mitch Marner rushed the puck up the ice shorthanded, with Zach Hyman streaking alongside him for a 2-on-1 that never turned into much.

Earlier in the shift he had disrupted a pass and, for a fleeting second, it looked like it could turn into something dangerous for the Leafs, but that hope died before much developed, too.

When Marner eventually changed, the next pair of Leafs forwards sparked another flicker of danger when Ilya Mikheyev hit a streaking Alex Kerfoot for another rush, but that time … OK fine, that time didn’t amount to squat either. It highlighted a bit of a theme with the Toronto Maple Leafs‘ PK — they’re always sniffing out offensive chances, regularly creating them, yet nothing ever seems to come from those moments.

There are currently four teams in the NHL left standing without a shorthanded goal on their resume through roughly half of this 56-game season, a rather hodgepodge group which oddly includes the Maple Leafs.

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There’s the lowly Buffalo Sabres, which, sure. No one has scored fewer goals than them. Then there are the Philadelphia Flyers, who have one of the worst PKs in the league, so maybe they get scored on before they get the chance to do much scoring. The Panthers are 20th in the league in PK percentage, but that’s not overly relevant here.

What is relevant, and what binds the Sabres, Panthers and Flyers, is that each of them is in the bottom half of the league in scoring chances while shorthanded. Buffalo is tied with Detroit for dead last at five scoring chances each. Five! That’s a total of 10 chances through more than 50 combined games.

Toronto is not bound with these teams in the same way. Despite having zero shorthanded goals, the Leafs currently lead the NHL in shorthanded scoring chances with 28 through 27 games. They are apparently laden with players who are wildly gifted at creating shorthanded chances, but unfortunately, when they arrange themselves in a stretching circle, it seems their hands form a to-scale model of Stonehenge.

It’s either that or they’ve just been wildly unlucky.

Since all Leafs fans are like “cut the generalities and just say the specific name here,” I’m mostly referring to Mikheyev. With him there’s certainly concern it’s a little bit more from column A (quality creator with stone hands), than column B (unlucky).

As a team, the Leafs have the fourth-best shooting percentage in the NHL, but their players who actually kill penalties, boy, they aren’t the reason why.

Mikheyev’s total of zero shorties comes despite him being first in the whole NHL in both shorthanded chances and shorthanded shots, with an expected goals for percentage of nearly 25 per cent. (That’s pretty good down a man.) Mikheyev’s had a hand in 16 of Toronto’s 28 shorthanded chances.

For context on shorthanded scoring, the Montreal Canadiens lead the NHL in shorties with a whopping seven, while Columbus has five. The Leafs are also in the top-five in expected goals with Montreal, Carolina and Tampa Bay (two shorties each) and Ottawa, who’s also been a little unlucky, tallying just one shorty to date … ironically against the Leafs.

If you sort the NHL table by scoring chances, no other team in the top half of the league has zero goals.

Numbers are always helpful, but there’s nothing quite like watching it play out in video form to get a sense for just what it is that’s happening here.

You can take video like that and offer retrospective recommendations for each moment, but in the end it boils down to the individual attributes of the players who kill for the Leafs.

I’d say that when Mikheyev has a chance to shoot, he needs to mix in some piece of attempted deception first, drop a shoulder fake, anything. You can’t just pick a spot and shoot at it against NHL goalies. I’d say on a couple of those one-timers he may want to hold on to it for a half-second to let the lunging goalies drop, but it’s tough to complain about getting a good hard shot off against a desperate goalie.

In the end, Mikheyev is excellent at anticipating how plays develop and using his speed to get looks. Make no mistake, if he continues to generate chances like that, a couple will go in.

The conversation here around Mikheyev once again speaks to this Leafs trend on the whole, as the type of players they use to kill penalties happen to be great generators and frustrating finishers (with the caveat being that if you generate enough, you still expect something to drop). Names like Alex Kerfoot, Zach Hyman and even Pierre Engvall — regular Leafs PK guys — are all bottom-half Leafs forwards in terms of shooting percentage. It just reaches a point where something has to give, and you would’ve expected that a while ago for this group. I certainly did, and I’ve been left waiting half their season now.

And so with that, this is something to look for in the second half, but more importantly, come playoff time. Right now they’re not getting rewarded for the great opportunities they’re generating (partly because of the players generating them), but they’re proving they can generate them with consistency, and that’s half the battle.

It only takes one goal to swing a game – and shorties hold heavy emotional sway – and in the post-season, that one goal that swings one game can swing a series. It feels like an added weapon the Leafs have that has yet to inflict damage, but they’re firing it often, and the possibility always looms that it could hit at just the right time.

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