Team evaluation
2017-2018 season vs. 2018-2020 seasons:
(Bold good, underlined bad)
ES:
CF%: 50.14% (16th) improves to 51.79% (7th)
FF%: 48.89% (20th) improves to 50.61% (14th)
SF%: 48.54% (22nd) improves to 50.01% (17th)
SCF%: 52.71% (5th) improves to 53.01% (4th)
HDCF%: 51.89% (10th) improves to 52.35% (8th)
xGF%: 50.23% (16th) improves to 51.69% (10th)
GF%: 53.33% (9th) improves to 53.28% (6th)
Save %: 92.22% (6th) decreases to 91.28% (14th)
SH %: 9.43% (3rd) stays the same to 9.95% (3rd)
At ES, everything has improved or stayed the same, except goaltending, which has dropped off moderately.
PK:
CF%: 10.86% (24th) improves to 15.67% (10th)
FF%: 11.34% (27th) improves to 17.47% (10th)
SF%: 13.00% (25th) improves to 19.35% (11th)
SCF%: 9.38% (31st) improves to 15.33% (7th)
HDCF%: 8.44% (31st) improves to 19.35% (7th)
xGF%: 7.41% (31st) improves to 14.14% (10th)
GF%: 8.51% (24th) improves to 10.75% (22nd)
Save %: 88.32% (8th) decreases to 85.46% (25th)
SH %: 7.27% (22nd) decreases to 7.30% (26th)
On the PK, everything has improved or stayed the same, except goaltending, which has dropped off considerably, and SH%, which has dropped slightly in rank only.
PP:
CF%: 87.31% (14th) decreases to 86.19% (17th)
FF%: 85.97% (12th) decreases to 84.47% (15th)
SF%: 84.60% (13th) stays the same to 82.98% (13th)
SCF%: 89.92% (7th) decreases to 88.93% (9th)
HDCF%: 91.98% (1st) decreases to 85.71% (13th)
xGF%: 91.74% (5th) decreases to 87.27% (16th)
GF%: 91.80% (7th) decreases to 85.05% (22nd)
Save %: 92.75% (7th) decreases to 88.15% (25th)
SH %: 14.78% (9th) decreases to 13.83% (12th)
On the PP, everything has gotten slightly to moderately worse, except shots %. The thing that dropped the most? Goaltending.
Let's evaluate why the PP might be worse. There was one major change to how our PP worked between those 2 samples. Our team switched from using 2 split units to stacking 1 unit. Now, normally, this wouldn't be an issue. However, Babcock did something that pretty much nobody else does when they do this. He, for some reason, kept the same PP TOI distribution between his 2 units. This neutered the overall impact of the PP for the team, and made our team stats worse. Half of our time was wasted with a mediocre group with no high impact player on the ice.
This is no longer an issue, and personally, I don't have much concern for our abilities on the PP moving forward. Based on comments by others, this is where I would assume most others would also have the least concern going forward. Our improvements at ES and on the PK more than make up for it anyway. My one wish for the PP is that we stop endlessly passing back in our entry, wasting tons of time, but I'm not sure who exactly this directive is coming from.
So we're left with one final question. Why is our goaltending so much worse?
Has team defense gotten worse?
ES: 25th -> 21st
PK: 20th -> 8th
PP: 24th -> 29th
No. Team defense has improved slightly at ES, improved significantly on the PK, and gotten slightly worse on the PP. Team defense certainly doesn't explain the drop.
When we look closer, why becomes clear. First reason, Andersen's play has fallen off a cliff on special teams. On the PP, Andersen's SV% has dropped from 0.932 to 0.900. On the PK, Andersen's SV% dropped from 0.889 to 0.852, despite team defense on the PK improving significantly. To put this in perspective, Andersen has the worst PK save percentage of all of our goalies to have played in 2018-2019 or 2019-2020. Yes, you heard me right. Worse than Campbell, Sparks, Hutchinson, and even Kaskisuo.
Second reason, the backup. Has our backup been great for most of 2018-2020? No. Does that normally have significant impacts? No. One big reason why our overall goaltending has gotten worse when compared to specifically 2017-2018, is that in 2017-2018, we had a 35 year old journeyman backup fluke into a Vezina-quality season, for seemingly no reason other than luck over a small sample.
And no, I don't exaggerate when I say that. At all strengths, of all goalies who played 250 or more minutes in 2017-2018, McBackup had the #1 best goals saved above average in the league, by a significant amount. He had the #1 best save percentage. He was not that level of player. At all. It was wildly unsustainable.
So we're left with a better team at ES. A better team on the PK. A slightly worse team on the PP, for reasons that look to be tied to Babcock, not Dubas or the construction of the team. And then we're left with worse goaltending, for two reasons. One reason was a combination of the unavoidable drop-off of our backup's fluke 2017-2018 season, as well as the lack of quality backup for most of that time (literally the only negative that can be tied to Dubas, for something which usually has a fairly small impact). The part of that that could be addressed by Dubas, has been. A quality backup in Campbell was brought in. The second reason was Andersen's worse individual play, but he was one of our best players for 3 years before this current one, so expecting Dubas to have done something or seen this coming, was unreasonable. Going forward, Andersen should bounce back from his year this year, and we look to have a quality backup.
In answer to the question about my optimism level, there are two answers, in a way. I was more optimistic in 2017-2018, because I was naive, and I didn't understand how inflated 2017-2018 really was, relative to where we actually were as a team. Everything was coming up Milhouse at that point. We were ahead of our development cycle and playing with house money, and we kept getting really lucky. However, I am more optimistic now going forward than I should have been in 2017-2018, based on the reality of the situation. We are in a much better position now.
on his botched 3 Amigos contracts
and how the Leafs are now in CAP HELL 
having 3 of the 7 highest AAV players (Matthews #3, Tavares #6 and Marner #7) in the league and a marginal playoff team fighting tooth and nail just to get into the playoffs, while trading their own 1st rounder to buy cap space in the process.
