“I think you just got to make sure you come to the rink on time and work hard. We didn’t start on time and that’s going to cost you.”



That’s a Mike Babcock quote from 2017, but it fits well with the recent narrative in Leafs Nation.



There have been quite a few games lately where the team has started off flat against their opponents early in the game and followed it up with a dominant second period. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about this topic because, typically, when you see people talking about slow starts in sports, it’s often more of media-driven narrative than anything (often based on tiny small samples). Taking the temperature of the fanbase, though, it feels like an area worth diving into.



With that in mind, my goal today is to determine if there’s a quantifiable trend that indicates Toronto has been starting off games poorly this season relative to the rest of the league.



The last part of...