Last week, there was an interesting quote from Mike Babcock floating around on Twitter that I thought deserved a deeper investigation.







In a vacuum, this sounds pretty reasonable. You don’t want to burn out your best players in the regular season (since all we care about is playoff success), so 18-to-19 minutes per night sounds about right for an 82-game grind.



The issue is that in Babcock’s most recently-coached playoff game (Game 7 against Boston), he only played Matthews 18:48 despite Toronto trailing since the first period. This resulted in quite the backlash on Leafs Twitter, which can be summed up pretty well with the following two responses.



As Jacqueline Taylor and Jeff Veillette point out, the context is key here. In a Game 7, if you lose, there’s no tomorrow. It’s why we see teams throw out everything but the kitchen sink in other professional sports (e.g. Kawhi Leonard playing nearly the entire game against...