Pack the Golf Clubs? The Numbers Behind the Leaf Are Hard to Look At

The Toronto Maple Leafs played in Tampa Bay on Wednesday night. Auston Matthews was at the White House on Tuesday with the rest of Team USA’s gold medal roster, which is where you go when you captain the American team to their first Olympic gold in 46 years and the President invites you to the Oval Office. Matthews handled the whole thing with the careful composure that defines his public persona: the correct answers, the right tone, the practiced absence of controversy and politics.

Then, he had to get on a plane back to Canada and dress for a team sitting fourteenth in the Eastern Conference.

The Record and What It Means

Toronto is 27-23-9 through 59 games, per HockeyStats.com’s model updated February 26. That puts them at 63 points in the standings, tied with Ottawa for the second Eastern wildcard spot, except their divisional position is marginally worse than the Senators’, which is why HockeyStats.com prices their playoff probability at 10 percent while PlayoffStatus.com has them at 12. Both models are working from the same underlying data. The difference in output is rounding. The conclusion is identical: Toronto needs to go roughly 15-8-2 the rest of the way to reach a viable points total, and they have shown no sustained run of that quality at any point in 2025-26.

The preseason over/under on the Leafs was 99.5 points, per Hockey-Reference.com. They are currently tracking to finish at approximately 88-90. Their Simple Rating System score is -0.17, twentieth in the league, which is a composite measure of margin of victory adjusted for schedule strength. The Leafs are a slightly below-average NHL team by that measure. For a franchise that entered the season with genuine playoff aspirations after a second-round exit last spring, that figure is a full accounting of what went wrong.

The Defensive Numbers Are Not a Blip

Hockey-Reference.com has Toronto’s goals against at 202 through 59 games, which ranks 31st of 32 teams. Only one franchise in the NHL has allowed more. The Leafs are giving up 3.42 goals per game. Their goals for total sits at 190, which is 13th — meaning this is not a team that can’t score. It is a team that cannot stop the other team from scoring at a rate that makes the goals it produces matter.

That distinction is important because the conversation around the Leafs tends to default to the offensive stars when things go wrong, and the offensive stars are not the problem. The problem is structural and it lives in front of the net, behind the blue line, and in a goaltending situation that spent the first two months of the season in various states of crisis.

Anthony Stolarz came into this season as arguably the most underrated goaltender in the league. His .926 save percentage last year was the best among goalies who played at least 15 games; better than Hellebuyck, better than Vasilevskiy, better than most (if not anyone). Toronto gave him a four-year extension and ran him hard out of the gate while Joseph Woll was on a personal leave of absence. By November 11, Stolarz was posting a 3.51 GAA and a .884 save percentage before an injury against Boston shut him down entirely. That is not a player having a bad run. That is a player whose workload in the first six weeks of the season contributed directly to a physical breakdown, and a coaching staff that either did not see it coming or could not address it given the circumstances with Woll.

Woll returned November 15 in Chicago and has been the Leafs’ most reliable goaltender since. His current line is 13-7-4 with a 2.92 GAA and a .910 save percentage, which ranks tied-thirteenth in the league among starters. That is a functional NHL goaltender. It is not enough to compensate for 31st-ranked team defence, and both things are simultaneously true.

The Matthews Situation, Specifically

Matthews has 26 goals and 50 points through 53 games, per Hockey-Reference.com. On pace for roughly 39 goals and 77 points over a full season. Those are good numbers for a player on most rosters. For the player who scored 69 goals in 2023-24 and who carries the franchise’s entire identity, they represent a significant deceleration that the Toronto market has not fully processed.

His Corsi-for percentage this season is 46.5, per Hockey-Reference.com. For context, his career figure is 53.2. That gap — nearly seven full percentage points — means that when Matthews is on the ice at five-on-five this season, the Leafs are being outshot more often than not. For a player whose possession numbers have been among the best at his position for most of his career, that is an anomalous figure that points either to the players around him, to the deployment decisions of coach Craig Berube, or to some combination of both. His offensive zone start percentage sits at 52.6, down from a career average above 58, which means Berube is using him in harder defensive situations than he historically has been. That context matters when reading the possession numbers.

CBS Sports noted in early January that Matthews had managed just three multi-point games through 32 appearances, a stretch of individual inconsistency that is unusual for a player of his calibre. He has found some form since, and his Olympic performance — five points in three group stage games for Team USA, including two goals against Germany — was a reminder of what the ceiling looks like when he is playing freely. The question is whether that form carries back into a Leafs uniform and a team context that has not supported it this season.

The Path to the Playoffs, Numerically

The Leafs need approximately 30 points from their remaining 25 games to reach a points total that gives them a credible wildcard claim. That is 15 wins from 25 games — a 60 percent win rate from a team that has won 54 percent of its games this season and that is 31st in goals against. The Eastern wildcard race currently involves Montreal, Ottawa, Detroit, Buffalo, and Toronto in a five-team cluster separated by seven points. Montreal controls the most favourable position. Toronto controls the least.

HockeyStats gives the Leafs a 0.4 percent chance of winning the Stanley Cup. PlayoffStatus has them below one percent. Those figures are not pessimism — they are what the models produce when you input a team with a negative SRS, a 31st-ranked defence, and a goaltender posting a 2.92 GAA into a playoff bracket that would require four series wins against teams with significantly better underlying numbers.

The Broader Picture

None of this is new information to anyone who has watched this team closely. The Leafs have entered the post-Olympic stretch of their schedule with the same structural vulnerabilities they have carried since October — a defence that gives up too many clean looks, a goaltending situation stabilized but not solved, and an offensive core that is productive enough to keep the team in games but not dominant enough to make up for what happens at the other end.

Matthews returns from Italy with a gold medal. Morgan Rielly, who was cleared to go by Berube before the break after an upper-body injury and has 24 assists and 31 points through 54 games this season, steps back into his spot on the top pairing. The pieces are the pieces. They have been the pieces for several years.

That is where things stand on February 26, 2026. The numbers are the numbers. The team has 25 games to change them.

Sources: Hockey-Reference.com, February 26, 2026; HockeyStats.com, updated Feb 26, 2026 10:33 PM PST; ESPN NHL player stats, February 26, 2026; CBS Sports NHL, February 26, 2026; PlayoffStatus.com, NHL Post Season Probabilities, February 2026; StatMuse Maple Leafs standings, February 2026; The Hockey News, “Joseph Woll Eases Maple Leafs’ Goaltending Struggles,” November 2025; RotoWire, Auston Matthews player profile, February 2026.

‌

‌

‌