We just submitted the following to pensionplanpuppets.com…………….

I have a possibly a different take on why the Leafs may be interested in Andersen. We have analyzed every player on every team for their propensity to make mistakes (excluding goalies) and have quantified and aggregated same. According to our work, ANA was last in the western conference this season and at the bottom of the NHL last season as well. The Ducks are a ridiculous outlier in this respect – they are the only team in the west to have made the playoffs the last two years who scored so abysmally low on my scale; and the scale had a retrospective Spearman’s rho of roughly 0.65 for final order of finish (and about 0.90 in the east). Bottom line, adjusted for time on ice, ANA should have been the worst team in the west points wise. We have written a number of pieces in which I opine that ANA is an enigma in every respect (and was last year also).

However, the Ducks made the playoffs…..again……somehow. They were the only team with their profile who did. Amazingly many pundits had them going to the finals or winning the cup this year. I think we may have been the only ones to have picked NSH over the Ducks. Yes, they were that bad on our scale.

So what could possibly have saved (pun intended) ANA’s statistically outlying situation from exposed ruin? Well, the goaltending of Andersen is a distinct possibility (when he was actually healthy or not splitting time). Our modeling admittedly fails to account for the goalie; but we saw this year a perfect example of what happens when an elite goaltender goes down to injury for a team that sucks on the back end………….the absence of Carey Price in MTL.

So I am positing, FWIW because I am only deducing a conclusion based on ANA and not Andersen, but do the Leafs brass see something similar to what we have seen? If so, this may be a much better gamble for TOR than it appears at first blush. Without a replacement for Andersen in ANA, the Ducks mistake affinities might get further exposed next season.