Leafs @ Panthers - Mar. 14th, 7:30pm - TSN4, Fan 590

[rdowdall]

Perhaps.  I'd have to go through and look at their records at different parts of the season.  I just remember the 18 wheeler off a cliff comment, and that came after the Leafs had maintained a playoff spot for most of the year, only to win something like 4 of their last 25 games and fall down far enough to get Reilly.

Even the year that they made the playoffs in the shortened season, it looked like they were hitting a wall, in which if the season had been longer they may have missed out.

In those years though, the possession numbers spoke to those teams eventually hitting some sort of self correction that would mean that the wins that the had obtained to that point had been mostly do to luck.  Those teams were bad defensively, and the offense mainly came from JVR, Bozak and Kessel

The possession numbers are better now but the defence is still a train wreck.

Maybe I should have just said, before the Leafs were bad defensively, and in the years where they eventually dropped out of playoff contention, their poor play defensively was considered to be the root cause.  The Leafs are still a poor team defensively, and unless they can fix that part of their game, then these tail offs at the end of the season are probably going to continue.

All I'm trying to say is that the better a team generally is the less likely they are to have any extended stretches where they lose a lot and as a result we're less likely to try to search for reasons as to why a team sort of reverted to it's talent level over time or ascribed a narrative dependent on when they played bad over the course of a year(eg "started slow", "imploded", "hit a wall").

If you have three roughly equal teams all of whom finish with 90 points but one has a strong first half, the other a strong second half and the third is pretty even throughout then the tendency will be to describe the first team as "chokers" or the second team as having figured things out or, if they miss the playoffs, only playing well without pressure or whatever when it can just be, you know, the vagaries of the schedule/luck/whatever.

Ah, yeah that makes sense.  I think at the end of the day, we're both trying to say that this team still is not good yet and that their record is a bit misleading.  The only reason I say that's scary is because I don't know how they are going to fix the thing that is holding them back from being good.