Read through ‘Maple Leafs Twitter’ and it won’t take you long to find a number of people complaining about the way the Leafs exit the defensive zone. Complaints about bad stretch-passes are commonplace and yes, when a long pass out of the D-zone gets picked off or goes for an icing, it does look ugly. But there’s a method to the Maple Leafs madness and when one accounts for all of the stretch-passes they make, it’s clear why the Leafs continue to rely so heavily on them.

In September, I wrote an article about the value of stretch-passes in general and more specifically, the Maple Leafs penchant for using them despite their remarkably low success rate. In researching that article, I determined the reward of a completed stretch-pass (a pass from the defensive zone to beyond the red line) far outweighs the risk of an incompletion, therefore, it really doesn’t matter if a team fails on a high number of its attempts. I explained why here and likened it to baseball where more and more, batters are taking a power over average approach.

Now that we’re almost a month and a half into the season, I thought I’d follow up on that article to see if:

A) The Maple Leafs are employing the same breakout strategy as last season.

B) If they’re any better at connecting on these passes and

C) If, league-wide, the reward still vastly outweighs the risk.

Here’s what I found:

A)They are

B) Nope. They’re worse

C) It does.

Leafs defensemen are actually attempting more stretch-passes than last season, once again leading the NHL at over 19 per game. They also have the highest stretch-pass tendency in the league, a measure of how often a team opts for a stretch pass as opposed to a D-to-D pass or outlet pass (any north pass from the defensive zone that is received before the red line). Here’s a comparison between this season and last season: