Toronto Maple Leafs Should Not Even Consider Trading Mitch Marner

The Toronto  Maple Leafs lost to Columbus and made some slight alterations in direction and philosophy, but not really.  Their biggest move was to sign a puck moving defenseman who doesn’t hit.  They filled out their bottom six with some old-school vets, and more or less stuck with their plan.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a data-driven team that make decisions empirically, using a holistic approach to hockey that hasn’t been seen before.  They don’t eschew traditional scouting, but they also don’t appear to blindly follow NHL customs like most other teams.  At the same time, not all of their decisions line up with what the NHL’s amateur analytics community thinks.

Without access, we don’t know for sure what drives the decisions the Leafs make, and we don’t know what stats or proprietary data they use and follow.  All we really know for sure is that they have made it their business not to chase and overreact to results.  They have a plan, and they are sticking with that plan despite recent results and growing criticism.

That is great news.

Since the team has failed 100% of the time in the 45 years prior to  Brendan Shanahan being in charge, I don’t see why people aren’t open to this new (and obviously more intelligent) way of doing things, but that’s just me.

The Leafs currently have the second best player in the world on their roster, as well as four other superstars and a goalie who looks like the best value in the league.  Their roster is in flux at the moment, but they have two stars about to break into the league and, according to most knowledgeable hockey prospect experts, a top five system. 

That is a recipe for success.  Though I get it might be hard to see it after the recent losses.  People are demanding change, but they should be ignored.  The one thing that has screwed this franchise for decades is the constant capitulation to whims of the fans and media.   (Player cards from @jresh).

The latest demand from the cheap seats is to trade Mitch Marner.  And with respect to my friends and co-workers who think the same thing, I have this to say: No offense, but that is the single worst hockey related idea I have ever heard.

The old Leafs would have for sure traded him.  And then it would be another 50 years failure.  There is not a single example of an NHL team trading a young star forward (other than the Lindros trade, which was special circumstances) and having it work out in their favor.  It just doesn’t happen.  Brett Hull, Doug Gilmour,  Joe Thornton, Tyler Seguin, Taylor Hall…..I could go on.  You trade a Marner-calibre player, you lose.

You also don’t trade a guy who posts an almost 70% expected goals rating in the playoffs just because he and his partner went on a slump.  Marner had 4 points in the playoffs to go along with great defense, great penalty killing and advanced stats that make it obvious the lack of production was a byproduct of a short-sample size. (all stats naturalstattrick.com).

Auston Matthews scored once instead of the normal five or six goals his career shooting percentage says he should have gotten.  And this wasn’t because of Montreal’s defense, Matthews and Marner combined to get one less high-danger scoring chance per hour of 5v5 hockey than they got during their dominant regular season.  And they only got about two hours of 5v5 ice time in those seven games.

The most important thing to do when you lose is not get mad and overreact because of emotion.  The Toronto Maple Leafs could try to do a lot of things this summer.  Some of them might even surprise us.  But trading a 24  year old who already has three 90 point seasons (prorated) to his name and is an excellent defender would be idiotic.

Marner was better than 93% of NHL players this season. He scored at nearly a 100 point pace during a season in which his team inexplicably went silent on the power-play for half the year.  He is great, and will get better.

Final point: Two-Way superstars are extremely rare.  Matthews, MacKinnon and McDavid are the three best players in the world by a nearly complete consensus, and none are as good defensively as Marner.

Players who are as good as Marner and score like him – players like Mark Stone, Pavel Datsyuk, Patrice Bergeron or Marian Hossa – didn’t come close to Marner’s success early in his career.  Marner famously has zero goals in 18 playoff games. Marian Hossa had one goal in his first 12, before going ton to appear in five Stanley Cup Finals in seven years, winning  three of them.

Marner is still 24.  Do Not Trade him.