Joe Thornton; still good (?)
Projecting Joe Thornton's potential on-ice impact in his 23rd NHL season
Joe Thornton will play for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the upcoming NHL season, whenever that happens. The thought of that alone is enticing, despite the fact that he’s not exactly in the middle of his prime. A quick peek at his counting stats will suggest that he’s on a steep decline, but we know that doesn’t always tell the whole story. This piece will dive into some underlying contextual factors in an attempt to decipher what on-ice contributions the Leafs are getting in the 41-year-old forward.
Thornton posted 31 points (seven goals and 24 assists) for an abysmal San Jose Sharks team in the 2019-20 season, which is by far his lowest full-season point total during his Hall of Fame career. That’s obviously concerning considering he is really quite old relative to his peers in the league. Like, super old. Taking his age and declining production into account it’s not surprising that Thornton has seen a big dip in playing time both at 5v5 and on the powerplay. The dip in ice time actually began a season earlier, in his age 39 season, dropping below 18 minutes per game for the first time, all the way down to 15.5 minutes per game. Thornton still managed 51 points, but he did so riding a seriously inflated individual shooting percentage of nearly 18% (16% at 5v5, 18th in the league among players who played at least 600 minutes) and an on-ice shooting percentage of 9.25% at 5v5. Thornton hates shooting so much that he needed a shooting percentage heater to score just 16 goals. The 2019-20 season saw his individual shooting percentage get cut in half, scoring only seven goals as a result, which was right in line with his individual expected goals. Again, he really hates shooting the puck. The Sharks saw only a modest dip in their expected goals for rate with Thornton on the ice in 2019-20 compared to the 2018-19 season, but the swing in on-ice shooting percentage caused a big drop in actual goals rate, from 3.02 goals per hour to 2.16. This despite his most common linemate remaining the same as the year prior.
The first column beside player x (x+19) is 5v5 TOI with Thornton. Yes, the Sharks just kept feeding maybe the best passer of all time Marcus Sorensen as his trigger man. I’m not sure how this happened in the first place, but I’m pretty sure the bloated on-ice shooting percentage combined with Sorensen’s bloated individual shooting percentage over the 2018-19 season caused them to try this duo again for far too long in 2019-20. Sorensen is a feisty player who skates fast, but he’s not exactly an elite shooter. Thornton still loves making passes from behind the net and Sorensen just isn’t the guy you want receiving that pass. I recently watched a few Sharks games from last season and saw a lot of this.
Neither Sorensen or Marleau have a lot of space when the puck lands on the tape in the clips above, but good shooters get a quick shot off from a very dangerous spot there. Thornton still makes these passes all the time.
These A3Z charts track back to the 2017 season and ‘19-20 was the first time Thornton didn’t rank in the 100th percentile in shot assists. He plummeted all the way down to the embarrassing 94th percentile at age 40. I need to see Thornton play shifts on the wing with Auston Matthews and John Tavares.
Thornton and Sorensen were horrible in general together, though, not just as a passer-shooter combo. In both seasons the pair were caved in relative to their teammates while playing together in terms of every shot and scoring chance-based metric, but Thornton’s raw results absolutely skyrocketed away from Sorensen. All heat maps are from the invaluable hockeyviz.com.
It’s important to note that these heat maps are relative to league average and not relative to teammates. For context, here are the Sharks 5v5 heat maps as a team from both seasons.
Even though the heat maps look decent for the Thornton-Sorensen duo in 2018-19, the team performed much better when they weren’t on the ice together. When Thornton played with Kevin Labanc and/or Timo Meier to play with, the Sharks dominated. Weird! Obviously, it’s much easier to play with good players than bad ones, so Thornton doesn’t get all the credit here, but those are some drastic swings. The point is, I think Thornton might still have a lot to give provided he’s given decent linemates. He’s got eight points in seven games in the Swiss League after all!
The Leafs are more than capable of providing him linemates who are not Marcus Sorensen or Melker Karlsson or whatever. Nick Robertson making the team and flanking Thornton is something that I desperately want to see happen, but Robertson will need a big training camp with the amount of depth options the Leafs now have. A third line of Mikheyev-Thornton-Vesey would be a real problem for the opposition. They’re all huge, for one thing, but Mikheyev and Vesey can also really skate. They’re both decent transition players and Thornton will need help in that aspect as he’s not exactly going to be carrying the puck up ice on his own much. His passing ability, however, can also be very useful through the neutral zone.
Mikheyev especially would have to make some major adjustments to his shooting tendencies, though, as he ranked near the bottom of the league in expected shooting percentage. He had a frustrating tendency of throwing the puck on net from everywhere in the offensive zone last year and you can’t have a guy throwing pucks on net from the half wall immediately following an entry while Joe Thornton is on the ice trying to create high danger chances for his teammates. Not that Thornton isn’t used to that.
It will also be interesting to see if Sheldon Keefe throws Thornton out with elite talent in the offensive zone when the Leafs are in need of a goal or two. From the games I watched, Thornton still looked like classic Thornton in the offensive zone. He loves getting the puck down below the goal line and if he gets any space at all to make a cross seam pass or a pass directly to the slot, he makes it. Putting him out there with supremely talented guys who love to shoot from the home plate area around the net like Auston Matthews, John Tavares and William Nylander sounds like a dream proposition for the Leafs. This becomes even more intriguing when you consider the way Keefe likes to have one forward floating high in the zone above the circles just looking for space or a lane to open up. How do you handle the situation as the opposition when Thornton has the puck on his stick low in the zone while, say, Nylander is trying to find space in the slot and Matthews comes darting in from high in the zone to the back door?
Thornton is just one season removed from ranking in the 90th percentile in WAR, according to the twin nerds at evolving-hockey.com, and I think his 97 PDO had a big impact on his poor WAR from 2019-20. Playing with Marcus Sorensen in front of Martin Jones doesn’t seem all that fun.
Notice his still elite impact on the powerplay. With his skill set, that shouldn’t surprise anybody. He’ll likely be playing on the second unit for the Leafs, which might mean that unit sees more ice time. Watching Thornton and fellow old guy Jason Spezza thread passes together on PP2 sounds like must-see television to me.
The last thing I wanted to mention was something I noticed over and over again in the small sample of games I recently watched. Thornton still seems to see plays develop before they even start and that, combined with his massive reach, results in him being extremely effective on the forecheck. Any time a defenceman tried to make a pass up ice, Thornton seemed to get a stick on it in some shape or form. He’s the speedy, crash and bang type forechecker traditionally thought of as effective, but he makes it very hard for the opposition to get the puck up ice with possession of the puck.
He also seems to come out of every board battle with the puck, either by shielding the puck with his body and eventually poking it out to a teammate or by just waiting patiently for the perfect chance to poke it out of the pile while chaos ensues around him. When said board battle is in the offensive zone and the cycle starts, he’s lethal.
Ultimately, I think the Leafs just need to put Thornton in a position to succeed and he could be a very impactful player for them in his likely limited minutes. As long as they can keep him relatively fresh, maybe resting him on back to backs some nights, he should be able to make everyone on the ice better while he’s out there. He obviously won’t have the impact he once did, but it seems to me that the tools that made him so special are still there. The only question is to what degree.
Put the graphs away. Give Joe Thornton great shooter at center who he can pass to & he'll be fine.