Assessing how much 'DAWG' the Maple Leafs have in them

It seems like we are once again on course for another battle between the “just watch the game” crowd and the crowd that really wants you to see charts about how great every offensive defencemen on a third pairing seems to be. Along with it comes the tired debate of which is more important to playoff hockey, talent or toughness.

Me, I fall in on Team Grey Area. People who say stats don’t show everything aren’t completely wrong and there is a lot of context and situational variance that makes it hard to simply rank players based on their numbers and instead it is often best to look at a collection of numbers and come with a meaning analysis based on the information at hand, not to necessarily rank them. On the other side of things, having thousands of random strangers sports yell their opinions on players is largely meaningless. Is there value in opinions of former players and coaches, absolutely. Is there notably less value in the opinions of an AM radio host attempting to fill a daily two-hour block with takes hot enough to maintain a regular listening audience, that is absolutely true. And that dude in the breakroom frothing at the mouth about the last bad play he witnessed, you can pretty much write him off. (Please note we are all that dude sometimes.)

There is an equally important balance between talent and toughness. Well…I’ll admit my bias and say you still need more talent than toughness but having players who are hungry to get the puck back, make life a bit more difficult for the opposition when they have the puck, and generally have something to offer during the time that your team isn’t in possession of the puck isn’t as trivial as some would make it out to be.

It’s in the spirit of appreciating toughness but also statistics that I bring you DAWG, the only stat that measures how much DAWG a player has in him. For the sake of making it an acronym let’s say DAWG stands for Doing Awesome things to Win Games. It’s a measure of individual shot attempts from high danger areas combined with hits and willingness to take hits. It’s drawing penalties but also playing on the edge that you take a few. It’s the willingness to drop the gloves and block shots. Sure, you can look at all these things individually, but it is the combination that truly lets us know where players stand, and this Leafs team appears to have more DAWG in them than any team in the NHL.