-“You guys gotta stop losin’. Get the power play together.”
-“Yeah, we’re working on it.”
Slap Shot (1977)
Welcome to Manny Malhotra’s Leafs. A team with some of the highest end offensive talent in the league, but seemingly can’t figure out how to use it when they outnumber the opposition. Over the past year we’ve come to talk about the Leafs power play like it was the bottom of the league, but it was decidedly middle of the pack at 16th overall. It definitely slid over the course of the year, but at the end of the day it was 16th. It will be most remembered for being completely ineffective in the playoffs but it was 16th, sliding back 10 spots from being the 6th best power play in the league the year before, and 8th the year before that. If you feel like going back to 2017-18, it was 2nd in the league. Given that the personnel has largely been unchanged, it’s going to come down to strategy and deployment that the Leafs haven’t been able to get past.
What went wrong?
The clearest answer for what went wrong with the Leafs power play …
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Author: Jon Steitzer / The Leafs Nation