Last season, Toronto Maple Leafs right wing ConnorBrown witnessed a bit of a decline in point production. Can he recover next season?
It really is a shame Connor Brown is destined to be overshadowed by the Toronto Maple Leafs‘ “big three” in Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. On any other team, it would be notable, at least, if a rookie scored 20 goals in their first season, as he did in 2015-16.
Even though the Maple Leafs serve such a large market, there is only a limited amount of space for reports and articles. Predictably, Matthews, Marner and Nylander stories are usually inflated to the very top, regardless of how much they’re really saying.
More from Puck Prose
- Detroit Red Wings 2023 Rookie Camp Has Plenty of Ups and Downs
- This Columbus Blue Jackets rookie doesn’t want to be forgotten
- 2 trades the Boston Bruins must make to secure the Stanley Cup
- 3 reasons the Avalanche won’t win the Stanley Cup in 2024
- This is a big year for Alex Turcotte and the Los Angeles Kings
This is really disappointing because Brown’s story is so much more interesting. As talented as the big three are, they’re all first-round picks who no one ever doubted would make the NHL. However, Brown’s story is very different.
He was selected 156th overall in the 6th round of the 2012 draft. He had scored 53 points in 68 games with the Erie Otters when he was selected. This is decent, but more is required for an ideal NHL prospect.
Brown would go on to score 69 points the next season and 128 the next. This came as a pleasant surprise to a Leafs team just beginning to enter a rebuilding phase. He was eventually called up to the AHL, where he would 90 points in 110 games with the Toronto Marlies. Brown had to really work his way up to the Maple Leafs.
Unfortunately, Brown’s season story is once again being overshadowed. Most articles of this fashion, are instead focusing on Nikita Zaitsev‘s decline, and what kind of window Jake Gardiner should be thrown out of.
Instead, let’s take a look at Brown. He was completely overshadowed during his rookie season, despite racking up an impressive 20 goals and 16 assists for a total of 36 points. This season, he saw a decline, scoring only 14 goals and 14 assists for 28 points.
So, why did Brown experience this sort of point drop? Did it have to do with ice time? Was it just unlucky variation? Is he already declining as a player? Well, let’s take a look.
Brown’s 2017-18 season
Brown and his fans came into the 2017-18 season with high expectations. He had scored 20 goals in his rookie season. There didn’t seem to be any reason why he couldn’t improve.
Unfortunately, due to ridiculous wing depth, Brown spent part of the season on the fourth line. This would cause his average ice time to decrease compared to 2016-17.
Brown had an average ice time of 16:12 for 2016-17, and 15:01 for 2017-18. Since he played all 82 games either season, we can make a direct comparison. If we turn these into seconds, then he played a total of 79,704 seconds during the 2016-17 season and 73,882 seconds during the 2017-18 season.
Let’s take a look at how many points he scored relative to his time on the ice for both seasons. In 2016-17, he scored a point every 2214 seconds. Meanwhile, in 2017-18, he would only score a point every 2639 seconds. This means that ice time was not the sole reason for Brown’s point drop.
Did he just get unlucky? Well, let’s take a look at his advanced stats. His PDO was 100.8 in 2016-17, and 100.4 this season. This is probably not enough of a difference to blame on luck.
Additionally, if we look at his CorsiFor percentage over the two seasons, it dropped from about 50 percent to 49.1 percent. The only factors that can explain this are either inferior linemates or personal decline.
Brown played over 40 percent of the 2017-18 season with James van Riemsdyk and Tyler Bozak. van Riemsdyk and Bozak both had significantly higher CorsiFor percentages than Brown’s, at 55.6 percent and 53.3 percent respectively.
He played about 35 percent of 2016-17 with Nazem Kadri and Leo Komarov and about 35 percent with Zach Hyman and Auston Matthews. These four’s average CorsiFor percentage comes to 51.1 percent (1.1 percent higher than Brown), while JVR and Bozak’s comes to 54.5. (5.4 percent higher than Brown’s).
This analysis has varying percentages and doesn’t take defensive combinations into account because I can’t seem to find that. However, if we assume that this information paints a foggy picture, it really looks like that Brown just wasn’t as good this season.
Conclusion
With this in mind, what should the Leafs do about Connor Brown? Well, I would advise management, who I know are definitely reading this, to hope that this is just an outlier season.
Brown is only 24 years old, and a bounce-back season is definitely possible. Sure, he wasn’t as good this season, but he has a lot of time to improve. If he has a similar season, however, then maybe a change has to be made.
Hopefully, he can forget about this sophomore slump, and get back on track, next season.