the question of which hockey player is the single best in the history of a franchise more than a century old will not be resolved by me. all i can offer is a humble statistical analysis to present my case for Auston Matthews.
as of writing, there are 982 people who have played at least 1 game for the Toronto Maple Leafs (sic). that’s a whole heck of a lot of guys! how can we tell which one was the best at hockey? that’s a complicated question, but i’m going to ignore all the nuances and focus exclusively on goals and points because those are two of the most readily available statistics.
“but wait!” you might say. “you can’t simply compare the goals and points of players from different decades! there have been vastly different rates of scoring over the years, so those measures would inherently favour NHL players from the 1980s, for example. is Rick Vaive the best Toronto Maple Leaf just because he happened to play in an era when goal-scoring was through the roof?”
hold your horses. i’ve accounted for this. that’s why i’m using hockey-reference’s adjusted statistics. the objective is to put all players on equal footing by removing the advantages that players in certain eras have over others. the NHL season used to be less than 82 games long; thus, the players who played in longer seasons will naturally score more goals and points. team rosters used to have a limit of less than 18 skaters; thus, the players who played with fewer teammates were given more ice time and scored more often. more goals were scored per game in some eras than in others due a combination of factors such as goaltending, team systems, rule enforcement, and the average quality of opposing teams. to adjust for these differences, hockey-reference uses an equation to normalize goals, assists, and points such that players can more easily be compared across eras. this is what i will use to argue that Auston Matthews is the greatest Leaf of all-time.
i will note here that i am looking only at players in the modern era (the 1967-68 season to present) because, the way i see it, hockey was a fake sport before then. there were only 6 teams in the NHL for most of its pre-’67 history (and never more than 8); the butterfly style of goaltending had not been developed; and the general quality of competition has improved so much since then that i will simply disregard everyone who played before 1967. my apologies to past greats like Syl Apps, Charlie Conacher, George Armstrong, and Ted Kennedy. maybe you were the best Leafs of your era, but i’m going to arbitrarily rule you ineligible for the overall title. send your complaints to my gaping ass hole.
in terms of adjusted goals since 1967-68, Auston Matthews already sits third in Leafs history, behind only Mats Sundin and Darryl Sittler. while it took Sittler 12 years (his age 20 through 31 seasons) to reach 335 adjusted goals, Matthews has scored 298 in just 6. on a per-game basis (among the top 200 Leafs in adjusted goals), Matthews pulls into the lead, with 0.74 adjusted goals per game. in second place is Dave Andreychuk, with 0.56. that’s a 24% dropoff! clearly, Matthews is the most efficient goal-scorer in the Leafs’ (post-expansion) history. but does that fact alone make him the best Leaf of all-time?
i posit: yes. hockey is famously a goal-scoring competition, so the guy with the most goals in the shortest time span can make a claim to being the best player. but i understand if you’re not immediately convinced.
let’s take a look at adjusted points. Matthews sits fifth in that category, back of the aforementioned Sundin and Sittler, but also trailing Borje Salming and Tomas Kaberle, two defencemen. analyzing defence poses is own set of challenges, which i will address shortly. anyway, is Auston Matthews first in adjusted points per game? surprisingly, no. that honour belongs to Mike Ridley (?), who played 48 games for the Leafs in 1994-95 and scored at a 1.33 adjusted point-per-game clip. Matthews is a respectable second at 1.28. if you want to call Ridley the best Leaf of all-time even though he only played about 60% of a full season with the team, be my guest, but i will disagree with you. Matthews is right behind him and has a much larger sample size (404 games and counting) over which he sustained that level of production.
throughout this post, i have been focusing exclusively on offence. there is a reason for that. defence is much harder to quantify, especially when dealing with players who played prior to the measuring of shots on goal in 1983-84 and other shot metrics like Corsi and Fenwick that didn’t become available until circa 2007. hockey-reference uses defensive point shares to measure value in this regard. however, the calculation of DPS involves using plus-minus, which is a garbage statistic, so it can be safely ignored. until we invent a time machine and use it to tell early hockey statisticians to start tracking on-ice shots, we simply have no reliable way of measuring defence for most of the NHL’s history. all we have is the “eye test” of contemporary writers and the list of Norris Trophy winners. neither Salming nor Kaberle won the Norris. i have no opinion as to whether that was the right call in either of their cases, but it means we can’t use that as evidence of their defensive prowess. consider this a scope limitation on my thought exercise.
and suppose you don’t believe in all that “era adjustment” mumbo-jumbo. all you care about is the raw numbers. “who gives a crap about the average goal-scoring environment of each player’s respective era??” you might be shouting. “a goal’s a goal, dammit! fancy statistical adjustments just obfuscate the truth of the matter!”
fair enough. so i’ll compare a list of players to their peers, without using era adjustments, to see how they stack up. i’ll take all the players i just mentioned (Matthews, Sundin, Sittler, Salming, Kaberle, Andreychuk, Ridley), add in one more for good measure (Doug Gilmour) & tabulate their goals, points, goals per game, and points per game & compare those to the other players across the league over the span of time when they played for the Leafs.
let’s start with Sundin. among skaters who played between 1994-95 and 2007-08, Sundin is fifth in the league in goals, behind Jaromir Jagr, Teemu Selanne, Keith Tkachuk, and Brendan Shanahan; he’s third in points, behind Jagr and Joe Sakic; 19th in goals per game; and 12th in points per game. all in all, pretty damn respectable. you can see why he’s in the Hall of Fame. to score at above a point-per-game clip for 13 seasons is insanely difficult. however, players like Jagr, Selanne, Sakic, and Peter Forsberg have him beat in terms of scoring efficiency. Sundin was never in the conversation for best player in the league because there were always at least four or five guys who were undeniably better.
Sittler’s up next. he’s fourth in goals from 1970-71 to 1981-82, sixth in points, 29th in goals per game, and 19th in points per game. so he was worse relative to his peers than Sundin in all categories except total goals. i guess that happens when you play concurrently with guys like Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Mike Bossy, and Guy Lafleur. since Sittler wasn’t as good offensively as Sundin, he can’t be the best player in Leafs history.
Salming is 189th in goals among skaters from 1973-74 to 1988-89, 34th in points, 200th in goals per game, and 149th in points per game. but this is sort of unfair to him. after all, defenders typically score fewer points than forwards because they skate further away from the net. so I’ll also compare him (and Kaberle) to defenders. Salming was 11th among defenders in goals, 4th in points, 58th in goals per game, and 26th in points per game. from this, we can see that Salming (like Sundin and Sittler) accumulated high counting stats from his longevity, but unlike the other two, he really falls off when it comes to efficiency. it’s quite possible that, by modern fancy stats, he’d make up that difference with his defensive ability, but without a way to retroactively apply them, it’s impossible to say.
Kaberle is tied for 311th in goals from 1998-99 to 2010-11, 66th in points, 836th in goals per game (among players with at least 50 games played), and 235th in points per game. none of those are even in Salming’s ballpark. when limiting the search to defenders, he ranks 21st in goals, 4th in points, 76th in goals per game, and 17th in points per game. so Kaberle was a worse goal-scorer than Salming, but appears comparable in overall playmaking ability (using points as a proxy). still, though, neither of them could be called the best offensive defenders of their era. moreover, Kaberle played with Mats Sundin for most of his Leafs career, and Sundin ranks more favourably in each of the above categories.
Andreychuk only played parts of four seasons with the Leafs, but he put up a fair amount of goals in that time. from 1992-93 to 1995-96 (which includes his time in Buffalo and New Jersey), Andreychuk ranks 8th in goals, 29th in points (behind Gilmour and Sundin, among others), 16th in goals per game, and 39th in points per game. he was an excellent goal-scorer (particularly in his famous 53-goal 1993-94 season), but was ultimately bested by the likes of Brett Hull, Alex Mogilny, and Eric Lindros. as with all of the players above, he’s not someone you could call the league’s best at anything.
in his lone season with the Leafs (1994-95), Mike Ridley was tied for 125th in goals, tied for 52nd in points, tied for 155th in goals per game, and tied for 70th in points per game. not a terrible season by any stretch, but it’s hard to argue that he was anything more than just Some Guy.
Gilmour was 49th in goals from 1991-92 to 1996-97 (including his time with Calgary and New Jersey), 14th in points, 81st in goals per game, and 22nd in points per game. thus, he wasn’t on the level of Sundin or Sittler when compared to the rest of the league, so he can’t be the best Leaf. that suits me just fine because he allegedly sexually assaulted a minor when he played in St. Louis, so I don’t want him to be anyway. fuck that guy.
finally, we get to Matthews. since entering the league in 2016-17, Matthews is first in the league in goals, 9th in points, first in goals per game, and 12th in points per game. this, to me, is the crux of the argument for Matthews-as-greatest-Leaf: not only is he the best goal-scorer in team history, he is also the best goal-scorer in the league, which is something that no other Maple Leaf in the modern era has been able to claim. he’s no slouch when it comes to points either: he ranks comparably to Mats Sundin and higher than Sittler, Andreychuk, and Gilmour. we are witnessing greatness, night in and night out, from one of the league’s premier talents.
and I haven’t even acknowledged his excellent all-around play! as previously stated, i can’t compare him defensively to the legends of the past, but i’ll compare him to his peers just for fun. according to evolving-hockey, Matthews is 19th since 2016-17 in expected goals-for percentage (xGF%) among players with at least 2,000 minutes of ice-time at 5v5. this season (i say, as i subtly shift the goalposts), he’s 4th in xGF% among players with at least 500 5v5 minutes played, 1st in xGF/60 (expected goals for per 60 minutes), and 24th in xGA/60 (expected goals against per 60 minutes). he is the best finisher in the league, but beyond that he is also elite at generating scoring chances and at limiting opposing teams’. when i look at the whole package, i see Matthews as the greatest player to have ever donned the blue-and-white and i don’t think it’s especially close.
but perhaps this whole exercise has been unfair because i’m comparing Matthews, a player currently in his prime, to a bunch of players whose late-career declines brought down their overall numbers. i’ll leave that for you to decide. if you value longevity over peak, then Mats Sundin (as one of just 15 players in league history to score at least 20 goals in 17 different seasons) still wins out. Auston Matthews has (hopefully) a long career ahead of him to either cement his case for greatest Leaf or to weaken it, and we’ll just have to wait and see.
ruminations of a sad oaf. 