Craig Berube has been the Maple Leafs head coach for two months now. It’s another two months until we get to see what he can do in training camp. We don’t know how he’ll coach the Maple Leafs but obviously, the best insight into what he’ll do comes from what worked for him previously in St. Louis. Here’s a look at some of the numbers on Craig Berube that while influenced by the type of team he was given to coach, will offer a hint of what he’ll try in Toronto.
When it comes to the results achieved by Craig Berube, they were true to where the team was at except for the shooting percentage heater in 2021-22. After an expected decline in 2020-21 after losing Alex Pietrangelo in free agency, the Blues plateauing or continuing to drop off would have been expected. Instead, the Blues had 9 20+ goal scorers on their roster none of who had a shooting percentage below 12.5%. The fact that only three players had 20+ goals the following season coupled with some key injuries brought the Blues back down to earth. They were not an offensive juggernaut.
The Blues were a low event hockey team under Berube. In contrast the Leafs had a 63 CF/60 and a 60.95 CA/60. Only in the year that Berube was fired did his Corsi Against pass the 60 mark and never did their shot attempts mirror that of the Maple Leafs. Some of this comes down to personnel as a team led by Ryan O’Reilly and Brayden Schenn is going to come with a more defensive mindset. You can also see that after the departure of Alex Pietrangelo the attempts allowed by the Blues steadily increased. With the Blues, Berube were getting out-chanced by a wide margin over the past four years. If the Leafs move towards lower event hockey it will come down to the forwards ability to play in their own zone to make it viable. Watching the Leafs attempt to defend leads over the past couple of seasons at least raise concerns about where they are starting from on this.
The interesting trend for the Blues is the variance seen in goals vs expected goals for compared to the variance for goals and expected goals against. For the most part the goals against and expected goals against were very much inline with what you’d expect to see, but unfortunately trended upward over the time that Craig Berube was in St. Louis. Berube might have been dealing a decreasing quality of defensive personnel, including forwards like Steen, O’Reilly, and Barbashev either being traded or retiring, but even when the Blues were being scored against, it wasn’t out of line in how they were playing. At best this feels like Berube was doing the best with what he had. The 3.60 GA/60 in 2022-23 was absolutely ugly and both that season and Berube’s final 28 games of 2023-24 were worse than the Leafs 2023-24 GA/60 of 3.13, but generally the Blues were better at keeping the score down than the Leafs.
When it comes to scoring, the PDO shooting percentage heater of 2021-22 was the only time that Blues were able to exceed the offensive output of the Leafs while Berube was the coach. The rest of the time the Blues were a low scoring, lower quality chance team preferring to limit the opposition instead of attacking aggressively. It will be interesting to see how much potential give and take there will be between the coach and the players to find a happy medium of playing effectively across three zones and recognizing the volume of high-end offensive talent on the Leafs.
The other piece that is somewhat is interesting is that over the past three seasons the Leafs have hit more, blocked more shots, and taken more penalties than the Blues. The idea that Craig Berube is going to inject some toughness into the Leafs roster may hold true but maybe less on the stat sheet and more through intangible actions. I’m not sure the Blues have the reputation for being a physical team but the evidence supports them being stingier than the Leafs when it comes to shot attempts, goals, expected goals, scoring chances, etc. Those would be reasonable things to expect from Berube, although it is worth considering that the Blues played that way under Berube’s predecssor as well and one that fits with Ken Hitchcock’s philosophy before that.
A lot of the philosophy is going to be linked to that of Doug Armstrong but it’s likely that the low event approach is something he looked for in his coaching candidates as he brought them in. It seems reasonable to anticipate that Berube will be implementing what he knows and taking advantage of the fact he has more talent to work with. There is bound to be some pushback and/or learning curves from the Leafs, but knowing that Berube’s past environment is radically different than that of the current state Maple Leafs might be enough reason to expect different results from the club this year.
Data from Natural Stat Trick and NHL.com
