Leafs at the half

The Maple Leafs’ season is halfway done.
Without further ado, let’s hand out some awards!

Best newcomer: Ilya Mikheyev

Almost two weeks after dropping Game 7 to the Bruins last spring, the Leafs plucked a little-known winger from the KHL and signed him to a one-year, entry-level deal.
It looks like arguably their finest strike of the offseason.
Whatever expectations Kyle Dubas and company might have had back then for the Russian — a potential replacement for Patrick Marleau at left wing? — were surely surpassed in the first half of the season.
In 39 games, Mikheyev showed he could do a little bit of everything: score some; chug up and down the ice with surprising speed; put his 6-foot-3, 195-pound frame to work retrieving pucks; disrupt power plays; and be a nuisance to play against, with a certain sticktoitiveness.

Mikheyev dipped a little in November but came on strong after that, even looking like a top-6 winger before an artery and tendons in his right wrist were scarily severed last week in New Jersey. Mikheyev was sitting fourth in the rookie scoring race at the time of the injury and first in even-strength points and shots. He was top-40 league-wide in 5-on-5 points, with the same number as players like Kyle Connor, Brayden Point, and Mark Stone.
His per-60 minute 5-on-5 production wasn’t far off from Mitch Marner.
The 25-year-old found a snug fit on just about every line he joined, particularly with John Tavares. The Leafs’ captain managed more shots, scoring chances and high-danger shot attempts per 60 when he played with Mikheyev than he did with the team’s top left winger, Zach Hyman.
All this amounts to a huge win for the Leafs.
Hitting a home run on a player like Mikheyev — an undrafted free agent — is hugely important to any team, but especially one living in Capmaggedon like the Leafs. They essentially nabbed a top-9 winger, who was on pace for 17 goals and 48 points before the injury, for almost nothing. It’s how they can survive paying all that money to their stars — by finding talent in unusual places (as well as usual places, like the draft) on the cheap.
Where it gets tricky with Mikheyev: He’s a restricted free agent this summer and will cost a lot more than $925,000 on the cap next season. How much more? Well, not having him around now for most, if not all, of the remaining regular season, might just keep the price down — although the team surely would prefer him being around to chase a playoff spot.
Mikheyev was a real darkhorse for this (most prestigious, imaginary) award coming into the year. The Colorado newcomers, Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot, had much stronger odds, and while Barrie has surged offensively since the coaching change, Kerfoot (as we’ll discuss later) is still finding his way.
Neither has had the consistent impact that Mikheyev had before getting hurt.
Jason Spezza and Pierre Engvall, meanwhile, get shout-outs for their contributions in supporting roles.

Most intriguing player: William Nylander

This is why, if you were Dubas last fall, you resist the urge to trade Nylander during the months-long contract squabble. And why, even when a $6.9 million cap hit looks a little pricey at the time, you get it done anyway.
You do it hoping you get something like this.
Nylander has resembled a more tantalizing, consistent version of the player who notched 61 points in each of his first two seasons, as a 20- and 21-year-old. He has real 30-goal potential for the first time this season for one thing, and while there’s a slight shooting percentage bump happening here (15 percent), it’s not so outrageously out of line for someone with a shot like Nylander. As Auston Matthews and other teammates like to crack, he’s hitting the net more these days, too, and firing from more opportune areas.
What also has helped the 23-year-old is locking down a spot on the Leafs’ No. 1 power-play unit.
Nylander didn’t get there until Marner hurt his ankle in mid-November, but Sheldon Keefe made it permanent even after Marner returned. Nylander has played a big part in helping the unit grow more unpredictable and dangerous with that wicked shot, passing ability and vision. He’s fourth on the team with 10 points.
That has been a factor in Nylander landing almost 18 minutes per game, a potential career-high.
Why most intriguing?
Because we’re seeing Nylander scratch even more of the surface than he did before. We have a pretty good idea by now of what Matthews is. Same thing with Marner. But the ceiling doesn’t feel established yet with Nylander.
We’re getting closer to figuring it out this season, and it’s looking well, most intriguing.
Some of that comes down to Nylander making considerable strides with consistency this year. He briefly slowed down in mid-December before heating back up again here recently — not with Matthews, interestingly enough, but Tavares.
Nylander is a top-40 scorer in the league right now (top-30 at even-strength) and on pace for 34 goals and 70 points.

Most surprising performance: Justin Holl

Could even Dubas, the biggest Holl booster around, have imagined that by midseason Holl would be soaking up 20 minutes most nights effectively (53 percent expected goals) in the Leafs’ top-4? Could he have imagined signing Holl to a three-year extension, with a $2 million a year cap hit, on Dec. 31? Just before Holl played his 52nd career NHL game?
Probably not.

What a year it has been for the 27-year-old, an out-of-nowhere half-season that has seen him leap from healthy scratch in 87 percent of the Leafs’ regular-season games last season, passed over for minutes by Nikita Zaitsev and Igor Ozhiganov, to one of the most stable elements of the Leafs’ defence.
Holl wasn’t even in the lineup on opening night.
The guy who forever struggled to earn the trust of former Leafs coach Mike Babcock is now checking top lines, killing penalties and even driving the bus on the rush more often now that Keefe is running the bench.
It’s the most unlikely of stories.
Holl was coming out of the ECHL not all that long ago, just trying to scratch out a spot under Keefe with the Marlies in the fall of 2015. Now, Holl is under contract longer than any defenceman on the roster.

Top defenceman: Morgan Rielly

This was easily the hardest award to give out.
With apologies to Holl, who has surpassed any and all expectations so far, the race came down to Rielly and the now-injured Jake Muzzin.
First instinct was Muzzin. He had been the most sturdy piece of the puzzle on the Leafs’ defence before he broke his foot last week, the wiliest defender, including on the penalty kill. He was boxing with top lines in recent weeks and bests Rielly in underlying defensive categories like shots against, scoring chances against, shot attempts against and expected goals against per 60 minutes through half a season. The Leafs don’t have anyone on the back-end with his combination of subtle defensive brilliance and veteran know-how.

Rielly’s season, on the other hand, feels like a disappointment so far. But I’m wondering if he’s being judged too harshly against last season when he potted a wild 20 goals and 72 points and finished in the Norris Trophy race, as well as some Jake Gardiner-esque decisions, which have occasionally blown up.
Would we look at his season differently if he was scoring individually like he did a year ago? Rielly is firing about the same number of shots on average as last year, but shooting an Arctic-like 2.7 percent. Last season, that number was a sizzling nine percent.
Rielly landed 10 shots on goal last week against the Rangers and didn’t score on any of them. He has gone 29 straight games without a goal.
Still, he remains on pace for about six goals and 50 points — despite falling off the top power-play unit when Keefe took over — or about the production he managed the year before his big breakout. He has mustered 1.10 assists per 60 minutes 5-on-5, about on par with last season’s mark (1.12). He still has more power-play points than Barrie and about double Muzzin’s overall production.
The Leafs aren’t destroying teams like they did when he was on the ice last year. Consider that at 5-on-5 last season, the Leafs outscored foes by 31 goals(!) when Rielly was out there, 99-68.
This year, that number through 41 games: 38-33.
Some of the shooting dropoff is proper regression. Some of it seems tied to Rielly taking a less forceful role in the offence. We haven’t seen nearly as many of the end-to-end rushes that made his season last year pop so forcefully, although he has been coming on a bit that way lately.
Was he limited by injury? Almost certainly. Was the apparent slowdown also because of who he has been partnered with this season? That’s probably an important part of the story, too. Last season, Rielly had the stable genius that is Ron Hainsey at his side. There was no worrying about what knows-where-to-stand Hainsey would do. He was predictable and safe, which made life easier for Rielly to make plays and defend.

Safe or dangerous?

Cody Ceci clearly leans more to the latter, and for a quarter of the season, Rielly lugged Ceci around against top lines, and while it often wasn’t pretty, the Leafs still came out ahead (17-16) on the overall tally, with an expected goals tepidly around 50 percent.
Of late, it has been Barrie at Rielly’s side, a big-time improvement in ability over Ceci but also an unpredictable force who likes to attack the same way that Rielly does.
A perennial Lady Byng candidate before this season, Rielly has taken 11 penalties already this season. Know who has taken more? Muzzin, with 16.
Ultimately, even 75 percent of Rielly tops a solid Muzzin half-season and some unlikely dependability from Holl. Rielly remains the chief of the Toronto breakout, plays more minutes — a career-best of more than 24 per game — than anyone on the team in all situations, and might be viewed differently right now if a few more of his 110 shots had found twine.
He’s one hot streak away from returning to top-10 scoring status among NHL d-men; he’s hovering around the top-20 right now.

Most disappointing performance: Alex Kerfoot

If Rielly not meeting last year’s high bar leaves you wanting more, he might be your guy here. Twenty games ago, this would have been Barrie. And there’s an argument to be made that Kasperi Kapanen, despite being on pace for almost exactly last season’s production, has disappointed a bit so far, especially after the Leafs gave him a three-year contract last summer. Travis Dermott, too, is still finding his way.
But while he has largely slipped under the radar so far, Kerfoot gets the nod as most disappointing through 41 games. He’s yet to give the Leafs a near-facsimile of Nazem Kadri, who he’s replacing this season following a Canada Day swap that landed Kadri in Colorado and Kerfoot and Barrie in Toronto. And that was part of the thinking behind the trade: The Leafs would upgrade their blueline and replace Kadri with a younger, cheaper model in Kerfoot, whom they signed to a four-year deal with an annual $3.5 million cap hit.
It just hasn’t happened yet.
The 25-year-old hasn’t delivered the same punch from lower in the lineup as Kadri might have. His apparent creativity and passing ability haven’t translated yet into much offence for himself or those who surround him (although some of the underlying numbers — scoring chances, expected goals, high-danger shot attempts — look a little stronger). He scored for only the second time in 20 games in the Leafs New Year’s Eve bash in Minnesota and has only one more 5-on-5 assist than Dmytro Timashov all season.
Kerfoot has won under 46 percent of his faceoffs this year, meanwhile, including 41 percent in the defensive zone. It’s not a slam-dunk either that he ends up at centre. Of late, with a rash of injuries up front, the Leafs have moved him to wing where he has found some comfort with Nylander and Tavares. Kerfoot presumably will end up back in the middle once Andreas Johnsson returns from injury, but if not, the Leafs will have a big question mark in the third centre spot (Engvall? Spezza?).
All that said, Kerfoot isn’t all that far off from putting up the same kind of numbers — 17 goals and 42.5 points on average — he did in his first two NHL seasons with the Avalanche. He’s on pace for 15 goals and 32 points. His 5-on-5 production actually exceeds last season (1.6 points per 60 minutes versus 1.4) but still falls well below what Kadri is producing this season for Colorado (2.2) and even last season (1.8) for the Leafs.
Another culprit: the power play, where Kerfoot and the second unit troop are largely forgotten. He had 16 power-play points for the Avalanche last year but only three to this point for the Leafs.
To truly make the offseason trade worthwhile, the Leafs need Kerfoot to ascend a little higher in the second half. It’s worth recalling that this is only his third NHL season. In other words, he’s still figuring things out and has plenty of runway to get far away from this conversation by the time the season comes to an end.

Top forward: Auston Matthews

This one is easy, and that’s sort of surprising.
Heading into the season, one would imagine the race for top Leafs forward at the midway mark to be the most challenging. But because Marner and Tavares were a bit out of sorts to start the season, and because Matthews has been a goal-scoring machine all year, it’s a runaway win for the 22-year-old centre.
He’s already around the corner from hitting 30 goals for the fourth time in as many NHL seasons, now with 27 goals after scoring for the 11th time in 11 games against the Wild on Tuesday night.
Matthews trails only David Pastrnak in the Rocket Richard race and leads the league with 18 5-on-5 markers and seven multi-goal games. The Leafs are 13-2-4 when he scores.
He has added a one-timer to his scoring arsenal this season and believes he has another gear to reach still on the power play; he’s just outside the top-5 league-wide with seven such markers.
He’s shooting pretty wickedly at 18 percent, but that doesn’t feel unsustainable for a shooter like him — and in fact, Matthews shot 18 percent as a sophomore when he popped 34 in 62 games.
He’s on pace to become only the fourth player in Leafs history to score 50 goals, potentially joining Dave Andreychuk, Rick Vaive and Gary Leeman.
If Matthews keeps rolling along like this, either in tandem with Marner or back with Nylander, and the Leafs keep winning games, Matthews will find himself in the Hart Trophy conversation for the first time, joining the likes of Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Pastrnak, Nathan MacKinnon and Jack Eichel.
His case gets more convincing by the day.

Most valuable player: Frederik Andersen

This race has tightened up in recent weeks with Matthews continuing to score like crazy and Andersen suddenly struggling, if looking sharp in a win over the Wild.
Andersen gets the slight nod primarily because of how important he is to the Leafs — how wide the gap is, in short, between him and his backup, Michael Hutchinson.


Arguably, the most impactful move Lou Lamoriello made during his three seasons running the Leafs was trading for and then signing Andersen to a five-year deal (which has one year remaining after this one). Andersen’s $5 million cap hit ranks 15th at his position this season. It’s the same clip that Lamoriello’s Islanders are paying Semyon Varlamov this season for part-time work and that the Blackhawks are paying Robin Lehner, also for part-time work.
Consider that the Panthers are giving double that to Sergei Bobrovsky ($10 million), as are the Canadiens to Carey Price ($10.5).
Matthews may end up grabbing this title by the time the year’s done. Fifty goals probably top another dependable .918 save percentage season from Andersen.
But given what Andersen’s nightly dependability, under one of the league’s heaviest workloads, means to the Leafs, maybe not.

 Well, I have been writing this damn blog since 7:30 this mornng, i guess it's time to get some breakfast. And a coffee wouldn't hurt either.

It is a new decade and I predict a Leafs Cup win, just not saying which year.