Coming in at number six with a score of 59.6% is Scarborough’s own Tyler Toffoli. An alumni of my alma mater BPCI, he’s one of the most boring and exciting players to watch rolled into one. Allow me to expand on that.
Every time I watch him play, I try to figure out what he’s good, or even above average, at. Nothing jumps out as being particularly amazing. Please don’t come at me with his shot, it’s basically the high side of average. And yet he’s been a consistently great player in the NHL for years. That doesn’t happen by accident. He drives play, scores goals, puts up assists, kills penalties, and makes life easy on his linemates. He just has amazing instincts.
This year, he was the “reverse Jonathan Drouin,” having the third-best Corsi-for percentage and second-best expected-goals-for percentage on the team.
Where he took a bit of a nosedive is in having the fifth-worst goals-for percentage and points pre 60. However, he did do this while having the fourth-most defensive zone faceoffs per 60.
Considering that his advanced metrics have been great his whole career, last year’s stats suggest to me that he was a tad unlucky. Certainly I was expecting him to be much higher up this list, but a lot was put on his shoulders to try to make his team succeed.
I’ll miss him. It was great having a B-mount boy on the team.
For more info on the model I used, check out the introduction to this series.
#6: Tyler Toffoli
#7: Jonathan Drouin
#8: Cole Caufield
#9: Michael Pezzetta
#10: Josh Anderson
#11: Rem Pitlick
#12: Mike Hoffman
#13: Joel Armia
#14: Ryan Poehling
#15: Laurent Dauphin
#16: Paul Byron
