Case for Leafs’ MVP is simple: It’s Andersen
The simple mathematical case for Auston Matthews as Maple Leafs MVP goes something like this.
In the 53 games Toronto’s No. 1 centreman has played this season, his team has operated at a 106-point pace. Extrapolate that over the full 82 and that’s a franchise-record total. Only a handful of NHL teams have performed better. And the production Matthews provides has proven difficult to replace. Matthews is one of just a handful of NHLers averaging more than a half a goal a game this season. So it’s no shock that in the 16 contests the Leafs have played without Matthews, they’re averaging about a half a goal fewer per game.
Still, the Maple Leafs have been finding ways to win even without their best skater. On Saturday they beat the Pittsburgh Penguins while Matthews sat out his sixth straight game while recovering from a shoulder injury. That put the Matthews-less Maple Leafs on a 92point pace this season. Not that a 16game sample is representative of what life would be like without Matthews for the whole of a season. But as of Sunday morning, a 92-point pace figured to be good enough to get an Eastern Conference team into the playoffs. The Maple Leafs have been diminished by Matthews’ absences, sure.
But they haven’t exactly been gutted by them.
So give my vote for team MVP to the truly irreplaceable member of the roster. With less than a month remaining in his second season as a Maple Leaf, goaltender Frederik Andersen is on pace to have the winningest season in the history of the franchise. Thirteen games remain on the Maple Leafs schedule. With two back-toback sets in the mix — including Wednesday-Thursday dates at home against Dallas and on the road at Buffalo — Andersen figures to get 11 more starts. Andersen, who won his 33rd game of the season on Saturday, needs five more wins to eclipse the franchise record for a season — 37, currently co-held by Ed Belfour and Andrew Raycroft. Given that Andersen is winning about 58 per cent of his starts this season, he’s tracking toward 39 wins.
“It’s opportunity. Getting to play a lot and getting to play on a great team — you’re supposed to win a lot when you’re a good team,” Andersen said on Saturday. “And that’s what we aim to do every night … It’s something we want to keep going and keep building on.”
That’s precisely the mentality the franchise’s overseers were seeking when they traded for the six-foot-four redhead from Denmark a couple of summers ago and promptly signed him to a five-year extension at an annual average salary of about $5 million (U.S.). He’s not just a striver who expects to win; he’s a grateful Maple Leaf who, for the second straight season, is clearly relishing the building buzz of a playoff-bound season in the centre of the hockey universe.
“The city’s on our side and want us to do good. That’s exciting,” Andersen said around this time last year. “It should never be pressure. It should just be extra motivation. It should be happiness in your life that you have this great city that cares about everything you do on the ice, and off the ice sometimes. That’s awesome. It’s like a religion.”
As Toronto reeled off its franchise-record 10th straight home win on Saturday, it was worth noting that Andersen has been better at home than on the road this season. Though he hails from a country where hockey is an afterthought, and though he broke into the league in the palmtree-shaded anonymity of Anaheim, Toronto’s bright lights have yet to faze him.
“Fred’s a big part of (the Leafs’ success at Air Canada Centre this year),” Mitch Marner said. “Every single night he comes in here and stands up like a brick wall.”
You can argue the Maple Leafs have taken a risky gamble here by assuming Andersen will prove brick-wall durable. Toronto’s No. 1 has been driven harder than any goaltender in the league this season, playing more minutes, facing more shots and making more saves than any of his peers. Last season Andersen endured what was, for him, an unprecedented workload. This year he’s on pace for an even heavier toll.
That’s at least partly because the Leafs certainly don’t have a goaltender in the organization worthy of challenging Andersen’s pre-eminence; right or wrong, in a salary-capped world NHL teams love the idea of an undisputed No. 1 gobbling up the vast majority of available starts.
One of Andersen’s earliest professional goaltending coaches, the ex-Vezina winner Pete Peeters, said in an interview last season that he long ago saw Andersen, with his hulking frame and efficient style, as the model of a highmileage NHL regular.
“I’ve always felt he’s been a legitimate starter from the get-go, where you can say, ‘He’s my horse, and I’m gonna ride him.’ And you ride him until he drops,” Peeters said. “I think that’s what Toronto has there … Toronto’s got the real deal.”
Goaltending remains one of hockey’s hardest-to-unravel mysteries.
Perennial excellence in the crease is elusive. How does Matt Murray go from leading the Pittsburgh Penguins to two straight Stanley Cups to being one of the worst starters in the NHL this season as measured by five-on-five save percentage? Why has Andersen been so shoddy in the past two Octobers — struggling through this season’s first calendar month with a sub-.900 save percentage — only to promptly rediscover elite form post-Halloween? It’s hard to know for sure.
Andersen probably hasn’t been the best goaltender in the league this year; Tampa’s Andrei Vasilevskiy and Nashville’s Pekka Rinne are likely making better cases for the Vezina, although that’s an argument that doesn’t need to be settled just yet. And Andersen isn’t without his quirks. (As a puck handler, for instance, he often appears to be more willing than he is skilled.)
But as a piece of the puzzle that is the most promising Maple Leafs season in years, you don’t need to wait until the season’s over to know Andersen is without in-house equal. Irreplaceable and seemingly indefatigable, he’s been the definition of an MVP.