On Getting Goalied and The Toronto Maple Leafs

A hot topic on Twitter recently has been the Toronto Maple Leafs and "getting goalie'd". The debate is something like this. First. Toronto outplays a team but loses. The shots are like 33-20, the xG is like 3-2, and the deserve to Win O'meter says Toronto would have won this game like 80% of them time. Then people begin claiming that yeah the Leafs got goalie'd tonight sure, but it happens to them more often than anyone else, so something might be wrong right? Is it Keefe, Marner, Matthews, the depth? Etc.

The first measured response to this is to look at the difference between their goals for and expected goals for. This will tell you, almost no matter what model or the sample size (within reason), that the Leafs are not special. They kinda just finish slightly more than expected given their chances. (Basically I think the team itself is pretty average here and Matthews is a god, thankfully Matthews takes more of the shots than anyone). The problem is this Macro level analysis misses out on game level variance. There is a chance that while the Leafs have finished well on average, that finishing ability has been clustered in specific games. If this happened, there is a chance have had more games where they get goalied than average, despite strong macro level statistics. This would be similar to how they have a strong xG%, suggesting they generally play better than the other team, but they also have way more disasterous games than most teams of a simialr quality. 

So let's test this. Do the Maple Leafs get goalied more than the average team? To define "Goalied" we are going to look at each game teams have played since 2019-20. Then we are going to set a variable equal to one when a team wins the expected goal battle by at least one but still managed to lose the game in regulation. Let's look at the league-wide results. Note I think league-wide results are important because as a fan, it's hard to know league-wide base rates when you mostly just watch one team. How else are Leaf fans supposed to know how often the Vegas Golden Knights and Pittsburgh Penguins get goalied if they are only watching the team a few times a year? I don't think very many people watch enough of the league as a whole to estimate where a team lies on a league wide scale when talking about a variable like this. So let's look at the league.

There are a few important takeaways here. The first is that the Toronto Maple Leafs have gotten 'goalied' 9 times since 2019-20. This is the second most time in the league since 2019-20. This may make it seem like might just be special. The problem with that is that Toronto is tied with the Penguins, Devil's and Sharks, and only ever so slightly ahead of the juggernauts in Vegas and Colorado. These teams are better than Toronto and have been "goalied" only 1 fewer time in 2+ seasons.

The other important takeaway comes from the trendline. You will notice it is sloping down. Good teams get goalied more often than bad teams. This makes sense, the Red Wings are going to struggle to outplay the other team and lose because they rarely outplay the other team. Since how often a team gets goalied is inversely related to how good they are, we can look at times a team got goalied as a percentage of total losses to account for this.

Now Toronto doesn't look special at all. They sit right in a tier of teams including the Penguins, Avalanche, Bruins and Golden Knights. No team in this tier is particularly special, they are all just good play driving teams who have gotten goalied on about 17 or 18% of their losses. Toronto is not special. They don't get goalied more often than other teams like them, they are just a good team. 

​ As an aside Its almost too fitting given the Hurricanes reputation as perennially underperforming their xG that the one team in the league whose fans can rightly complain about getting goalied more often than the rest of the league is Carolina. 

Last time I thought Leafs twitter was over reacting, I was wrong. The data showed that the Leafs played more bad games than we should expect from a team of their quality, this time, it looks like I was right and the meltdown about Toronto getting goalied is in fact an over reaction when looking at the league as a whole. Here are the main takeaways.

1) The Leafs do get goalied a lot.
2) Basically every good team gets goalied alot.
3) If one fanbase really has it tough watching their team get goalied super often, it is the Carolina Hurricanes, they are the only real outlier here.