The biggest news event of the summer in the NHL, at least as far as on-ice things go, was Mike Babcock eschewing the Red Wings to move into the most lucrative coaching gig in league history with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

This was noteworthy not just because of the money and the fact that this is the best-publicized team in hockey, but also because it was a guy with a reputation for ultra-competitiveness and a sizable ego going from one of the most successful coaching jobs in recent memory (he is currently 12th in win percentages among NHL coaches all-time) to a position that, while extremely beneficial financially, also might be the least desirable in the league.

The Leafs are a disaster in terms of what their roster looks like right now, especially because they just traded away by far the best player they've had in years. It's going to take a lot of digging to get out from under what Randy Carlyle and Dave Nonis did to this club, and with that comes the very real prospect that a Mike Babcock-coached team misses the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time ever. Let's face it: No way the Leafs are getting in this year, and next year, who knows what the roster looks like? Lou Lamoriello and Co. almost certainly can't make enough changes to get this team playoff-competitive in one summer, and they sure have the look of a five-year-plan-having team instead of one rebuilding on the fly.

However, while it's fair to say a lot of Toronto fans were expecting this year to only be a slight improvement from last given all the changes, it's also fair to say the Leafs in some respects appear to be well ahead of schedule. The results obviously continue to elude them — the Leafs sit well outside the Eastern Conference playoff picture already and in fact have the worst record in the league — but the process has turned around quite quickly.

This is largely due to the team at long last tightening things up in its own zone. In a lot of ways, the Leafs are now playing in a way that, statistically, is not dissimilar from that of the Babcock-coached Red Wings. That this is even a conversation that can possibly be had at this point is mind-boggling. Babcock seems to have taken one of the worst systems teams in the league, without a ton of high-level NHL talent, and more or less instantly transformed it into one that plays like the Red Wings of last season.

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To be clear: Last year's Red Wings were no great shakes overall, but again, you really couldn't complain about how they were going about their business. If you're regularly out-attempting, out-chancing, and out-shooting your opponents, the results are likely to follow in terms of goals and wins. When you do it by as wide a margin as the Wings did it under Babcock in even the fading days of their glory, that helps to ensure that you'll at least be among the top-10 teams in the league or so.

Now, there remain some obvious deficiencies where the Leafs are concerned here. Obviously possession, high-quality chances, and shots are all way, way up, but the goals aren't appreciably better than they were last year (when they were putrid), and the penalty differential is destroying the Leafs because their penalty kill is among the least-successful in the league.

As far as the goals at 5-on-5 are concerned, you can probably chalk a lot of it up to the Leafs carrying a very low shooting percentage and only a middling save percentage. Both, however, make some amount of sense to me given the quality of the overall roster (which doesn't seem to carry a lot of shooting talent overall) and the fact that a Jonathan Bernier/James Reimer tandem just doesn't seem as though it's ever going to bring its bearer a lot of positive results.