Maple Leafs Goals Against: The Penalty Kill Was Never the Problem

The Maple Leafs goals against number that explains the whole season

The Maple Leafs allowed 299 goals in 2025-26. That is the number that ended a nine-year playoff streak, cost Craig Berube and Brad Treliving their jobs, and triggered the most aggressive front-office overhaul the club has attempted since 2015. Toronto finished 32-36-14 for 78 points, eighth in the Atlantic Division and 15th in the Eastern Conference, and scored 253 goals along the way.

Here is the part most of the post-mortems got wrong. The penalty kill was fine. It was, by the raw percentage, one of the best in the league. Toronto killed at 83.5 per cent, which ranked fifth in the NHL. Whatever broke last season did not break on the kill, and diagnosing it correctly matters because Jim Hiller has one training camp to fix it.

Strip out the special teams and what is left is a five-on-five defensive structure that leaked, and goaltending that did not bail it out. Those are two separate failures that compounded each other, and John Chayka spent his first summer addressing both.

The scale of the collapse

Context first, because the drop was historic. The year before, Toronto went 52-26-4 for 108 points. The 30-point decline is the largest single-season drop in franchise history. Teams do not fall 30 points because of one thing.

They fell for several. Mitch Marner's departure removed a two-way winger who logged enormous defensive minutes. Auston Matthews' season ended with a knee injury shortly after the Olympic break, on a play involving Anaheim's Radko Gudas; he was reportedly limited to 60 games and 27 goals, well off his standard. John Tavares, at 35, led the team in goals with 31. When your veteran second-line centre is your leading goal-scorer, the top of the lineup has not held up.

But a team can survive a scoring shortfall. Toronto's 253 goals for was below average, not catastrophic. The 299 against is what turned a mediocre season into a lottery season.

The goaltending, stated plainly

Anthony Stolarz played 26 games and went 10-10-3 with a 3.28 goals-against average and an .893 save percentage. Joseph Woll played 39 and went 15-16-7 with a 3.34 and an .899. Two seasons earlier that same tandem had been the subject of NHL EDGE features arguing it was the best in hockey.

Both had legitimate mitigating circumstances. Woll missed training camp and the opening 18 games of the season for personal reasons, then never found his form. Stolarz dealt with an upper-body injury and finished the year shelved with a groin strain. Neither goaltender was healthy or settled for any meaningful stretch.

The mitigation does not change the arithmetic. A tandem posting a combined save percentage in the .890s over 65 games will cost a team somewhere in the range of 25 to 30 goals against league average. That is most of the gap between a 78-point season and a playoff season, sitting in one line of the box score.

What Chayka did about it

He traded Woll. The June 16 deal sent Woll and Simon Benoit to Philadelphia in the return that brought back Emil Andrae, and on July 1 Toronto signed Sergei Bobrovsky to a three-year, $21 million contract. Whether that was the right answer is a live argument — Bobrovsky turns 38 in September and is coming off an .877 season in Florida — and we made the case that the starting job is genuinely unsettled rather than handed over.

What is not arguable is that the position was correctly identified as a problem. You do not spend $7 million a year on a 37-year-old goaltender unless you have concluded the crease cost you a season.

Where the five-on-five leak actually was

A top-five penalty kill and 299 goals against is a contradiction that resolves in exactly one place: even strength. Toronto's structure at five-on-five broke down in the neutral zone and off the rush, which is the failure mode of a team whose forwards leave the zone early and whose defence lacks the foot speed to recover.

That description fits the roster as it was constructed. The Leafs' identity through three head coaches was to outscore their defensive lapses and let the goaltending erase the rest. It worked well enough for nine regular seasons. When the goaltending stopped erasing anything, the whole design was exposed at once.

The blue line did not help. Chris Tanev missed time. Morgan Rielly's defensive results have been trending the wrong way for several seasons — his deployment under Hiller is one of camp's real questions — and the group behind the top pair was thin enough that injuries forced the kind of matchups a contender never accepts.

What Hiller is being hired to fix

This is why the coaching hire matters more than usual. Over 175 games behind the Los Angeles bench, Hiller's teams allowed 2.60 goals per game, first in the NHL across that span, with the league's best five-on-five goals-against total. He ran a 1-2-2 forecheck that prioritized denying the neutral zone over generating turnovers deep in the offensive end.

That system is the direct antidote to Toronto's 2025-26 failure mode. It is also, as we wrote when examining what Hiller actually has to install in September, a demanding structure to teach a roster that has spent a decade playing the opposite way — and he has 13 days between the Sept. 16 camp opening and the Sept. 29 opener against Montreal to do it.

Chayka bought him personnel that fits: Nick Paul, Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger, Brandon Duhaime, Dakota Joshua and Steven Lorentz are all forwards who kill penalties and defend, assembled with obvious intent. Darren Raddysh was added on the blue line. The defence corps still costs $25 million and still skews old, which is the unresolved piece.

The number that defines 2026-27

Set a benchmark now. To make the playoffs in this Atlantic Division, Toronto probably needs to allow somewhere in the range of 255 to 265 goals over an 84-game schedule — a reduction of roughly 40 from last season, adjusted for the two extra games. That is a large improvement but not an implausible one, because the two inputs that produced the 299 were both extreme.

League-average goaltending alone gets Toronto most of the way. Bobrovsky and Stolarz combining for a .905 instead of an .896 is worth around 25 goals. Hiller's structure delivering even a modest five-on-five improvement covers the rest. Neither requires anything heroic.

Which is the optimistic case, and it is a real one. The pessimistic case is that a 38-year-old goaltender does not bounce back, the blue line ages another year in one direction, and a new system takes until December to take hold. Both futures live inside the same roster.

What's next

Watch the first 16 games. Toronto plays a compressed October under the new 84-game schedule, and the early sample will tell you whether the structure has taken. The specific thing to track is not the goals-against average — that is noisy over 10 games — but shot quality allowed off the rush.

The penalty kill will probably be good again. It was fifth in the league on a team that lost 36 games in regulation. That was never the broken part. Follow the standings all season on our standings page.