Monday Morning Leafs Report: Nearing 1,000 points, John Tavares’ legacy feels incomplete

NEW YORK — John Tavares is on the verge of becoming only the 98th player in NHL history to record 1,000 points.

Tavares has a chance to reach that milestone, oddly enough, with a two-point outing Monday night against the New York Islanders, the team he produced the bulk of those points for (621) during the first nine seasons of his NHL career.

Tavares memorably left the Islanders (the fan base did not approve!) to come home to the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2018 on a seven-year, $77 million contract. Time flies! This is the sixth year of that contract.

The deal can’t be described as a failure to this point. Tavares has produced 377 points in 384 regular-season games as a Leaf, the 24th-highest total in the league during those five-plus seasons. His 162 goals rank 17th.

Tavares has been a consistent producer of offence (in the regular season, anyway) and potted the biggest goal of the last 20 years for the Leafs, clinching a first-round series against the Tampa Bay Lightning in overtime of Game 6 last spring.

And yet, it’s also hard to call the Tavares signing an outright success either.

The Leafs were still in the infant stages of their reconstruction when Tavares chose to come aboard, passing on opportunities in Tampa, Dallas, San Jose, Boston and the Islanders. Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander had played two NHL seasons at that point. They were still kids. The teams they fronted had memorably lost close first-round series to Washington (six games) and Boston (seven games). Tavares was supposed to be the veteran star — a two-time Hart Trophy finalist who was turning 28 — that put them over the top.

“This simply puts us in the conversation,” team president Brendan Shanahan said after the deal was signed on July 1, 2018. “This doesn’t win us any playoff games. This just puts us in the conversation.”

And indeed, the Leafs were in the conversation in seasons 1-5 of the Tavares deal. His presence, however, hasn’t been enough to put them over the top — not yet, anyway.

Of the Leafs’ four big stars, Tavares has been the least productive in the playoffs.

Playoff points per game (Tavares era)

That shouldn’t be all that surprising given the ages and upward trajectory of the other three. Game 6 notwithstanding, Tavares has just been OK in the biggest moments. Not quite starry enough to drag the team he’s captained since 2019 deep into the postseason.

Tavares was notably held without a goal in the second round against Florida last spring and has been overstretched, at times playing centre in the playoffs (a roster issue that’s no fault of his).

His so-so performance wouldn’t feel quite as significant were he not one of the highest-paid players in the league, with an $11 million cap hit that still ranks as the seventh highest (tied with Drew Doughty).

The lack of team success has made it easy to wonder what the alternate version of Leafs history would have looked like had the Leafs not signed Tavares and instead kept the cheaper if more combustible Nazem Kadri in his place for the long haul. (Kadri played one season with the Tavares Leafs. He still had three years left on his deal, with a cap hit of $4.5 million, when he was traded to Colorado.)

Fortunately for the Leafs, Tavares’ game hasn’t plummeted in the latter years of the contract. He’s slumping currently, but remains on pace for 24 goals and almost 80 points this season, solid production for a 33-year-old.

“Consistency, I think, defines him because it’s also consistency in how he goes about his business every day,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said. “He’s made adjustments along the way but continues to be very diligent in both his preparation and his maintenance but also his development. He seeks to maximize every single day.”

He still has plenty of days left to change his legacy with the Leafs, perhaps significantly.

Maybe he won’t lead the Leafs to a Stanley Cup next spring or the one after that. If the Leafs get there at all, it’ll almost certainly be because Matthews, Marner, Nylander and Morgan Rielly, in particular, get them there. Tavares still has a chance to be a crucial supporting star in a run like that. And if that happens? It all changes for Tavares. He becomes the player who came home and captained his team to a long-awaited championship. They probably name a school or a street after him in that case. He goes from fringe Hall of Fame candidate to legitimate Hall of Fame candidate. He becomes a legend in Toronto.

But today? His legacy feels incomplete.

Points

1. The Leafs are 8-1-2 in their last 11 games with a plus-seven goal differential. Maybe the biggest reason for the run — which, it has to be noted, includes four wins in overtime or shootout — is the penalty kill. During the month-long run, the Leafs PK has given up three goals in 35 opportunities for a blistering kill rate of 91.4 percent.

2. Noah Gregor: “Right before that Sweden trip, our PK was struggling a little bit. And then we really started harping on it, harping on it … I think there were certain reads that we were maybe a little indecisive or a little caught looking when we should have been going, or everyone wasn’t making the same reads. As a unit of four, you really gotta be on the same page. Everyone has gotta trust each other because if there is a breakdown you know you’re having someone else there (to back you up). I think we had a few breakdowns where guys weren’t where they were supposed to be.”

3. Something that’s probably deserving of more attention: Rielly playing more than 25 minutes per game this season, the most of his career and a top-10 figure in the league. Nobody is playing more five-on-five minutes nightly than Rielly.

NHL leaders in five-on-five TOI

RankPlayerTeamTOI/GP

1

Leafs

20:04

2

Capitals

19:55

3

Sabres

19:55

4

Jets

19:36

5

Blues

19:33

4. Nylander leads the Leafs with 14 points during the 11-game run. He’s gone cold since Sweden, though, with just one goal and four assists in the last seven games.

5. It’s not surprising but still kinda surprising: Matthews (18), Nylander (13), Marner (nine) and Tavares (seven), the top four Leaf goal-getters, have combined for 47 of the team’s 80 goals this season — almost 60 percent.

6. Tavares landed a secondary assist on Matthews’ second goal against Nashville over the weekend. His scoring slump continues: He has just two goals in the last 15 games. The big number that sticks out for me: Tavares has one power-play goal all season. He had 18 last year.

7. Conor Timmins on his challenge upon returning from a 17-game stint on injured reserve: “Physically, I feel good,” he said recently. “It’s more a matter of getting my timing back and having a little more composure with the puck. That’s something I’d like to improve on.”

8. Before the Leafs played the Boston Bruins on Dec. 2, David Kämpf had a lengthy discussion with Keefe at the morning skate. He didn’t look happy when he came off the ice. “I’m just trying to find my game a little bit,” he said. Kämpf had scored one goal in 22 games at that point, but that wasn’t his focus. “I’m focusing more on the defence right now,” he explained. It’s the offence, in particular, that’s come around since. Kämpf has scored in each of the last two games.

9. The Leafs have 10 games in the next 20 days. Martin Jones is going to play some games in Joseph Woll’s absence.

GO DEEPER

Leafs’ Woll week to week with high ankle sprain

In focus: Noah Gregor on the penalty kill

It looks like Keefe may have done it again — created a penalty killer out of nothing. Or maybe not nothing, but out of someone who hadn’t killed penalties regularly in the NHL before.

He did it with Alex Kerfoot and now he appears to have done it again with Noah Gregor.

“I think, first of all, it’s identifying the traits that might make him a good penalty killer,” Keefe explained of his process for turning a non-penalty killer into a penalty killer for the Leafs. “In Gregor’s case, he obviously has great speed. I think he’s got good anticipation as well. He came from a place in San Jose that had been one of the top penalty-killing teams in the league, so he was sort of at the bottom of a group of guys that would penalty kill. He wouldn’t get a lot of minutes in games. But he said, as it usually works out, you become a regular penalty killer in practice. So he had enough reps there. And then it’s just spending time with it. And Dean Chynoweth has done a good job of working with the penalty killers individually.”

As Keefe noted, none of Gregor, Matthews, Nylander or Matthew Knies had killed penalties much in the NHL before this season. Which explains, in part, the sluggish start for the unit. “It’s taken time for that to come together,” Keefe said.

That it’s come around to this degree — the Leafs are up to 15th in the league heading into play on Sunday — speaks to real growth from that bunch as well as top guys like Kämpf, Marner and TJ Brodie and even depth defenders like Simon Benoit.

Also: Goaltending. The Leafs, thanks mostly to Woll, have a .938 save percentage on the PK in the last month.

And it’s about coaching, too; Chynoweth leading the unit and Keefe pulling something out of a player that hadn’t been fully exploited previously.

Gregor has logged 30 minutes on the penalty kill so far this season, fourth among Leaf forwards and already a career high. He’s taken over for Kerfoot on the No. 2 forward unit with Calle Järnkrok and has been on the ice for only three power-play goals against.

“I think it first comes with showing some belief in the player,” Keefe said.

— Stats and research courtesy of Natural Stat Trick, Evolving Hockey and Hockey Reference

(Top photo of John Tavares: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)