After 12 games and Habs Preview
After five games and some up and down play by the Jets I
wrote this about the sate of the team and where it was at. Ignore my part about Poolman being an LHD- LOL.
Now that the Jets have played 12 games, are second in the central division, and have the goaltending that fans and probably ownership/management have dreamed of it’s time to take another look at where the team is.
For those of you who read here regularly you know I like to use stats to frame a picture of what I see, what I thought I saw, and what supports my belief(s). I’ll never go too deep because I’ll leave that to people who are more qualified to spin a narrative together with deeper more complex stats. That’s their territory and they are usually very good with it. That being said not all stories about hockey need stats and not all stats need stories, but here we go.
After five games the Jets had turned the corner in some ways but still had given up 18 goals and only scored 16. Unless the team is the Penguins it’s always better to be scoring more goals than one allows. There was some optimism after five games but some lingering concerns as well based on the disasters versus Toronto and Calgary.
The crux of so many concerns expressed in this space and throughout the Jets world has been around Paul Maurice, systems, goaltending, and special teams. Within that mix was the basic premise based on evidence that the Jets were not driving play enough towards the opposition end of the ice and were conceding too much in their own end. Then the question was ‘why’?
Here’s are some images that are more current to show some support for those concerns and if they should still exist.
I’m going to show some charts here from Sean Tierny who goes by
Charting Hockey who, like many others, does a great job of putting numbers into easy to understand visualizations.
This chart shows how the Jets simply trail the NHL average in their share of shots that they take. The concern is that they do not drive the play in the way their record suggests.
This chart second chart is similar but it shows ‘pace’ in terms of minutes (60) i.e. the length of a game. Again the Jets trail in terms of pace at which they produce shot events. Remember all that talk from Maurice about speed of play and execution?
And finally there’s this one- measuring shooting percentage with save percentage for the ‘luck’ stat of PDO.
Now there is certainly more information that can be used to frame a team and provide context for what 'it' is in terms of statistical identity but I’m going to keep it simple, and mainly for myself.
When it comes to special teams the Jets were ranked 23rd on PP after five games with a 10.5% success rate. The PK unit was 30th at 71.4%. Remember an ideal average is to have those two numbers equal 100 when added together. Now, seven games later the results look like this for the period after the first five games.
PP 10th for 23.8%
PK 5th at 90%
That’s a major uptick.
For the total 12 games the PP and PK rank like this:
PP 17th for 17.5%
PK 18th for 80.5%
Here the team is slowly moving to that middle ground where it has so rarely found itself over the years. There are still teams running way above and way below, but for the Jets there has to be signs of improvement here that they should feel positive about.
What one can surmise from this data is that it would appear some improvement has been made on special teams and that it’s an area to watch going forward if only to see if this level of success is sustainable. From the bigger data as presented so nicely by Tierny, it’s clear that the Jets need to increase their shot rates while reducing the ones they face. Some might say ‘why’ because if it ain’t broke don’t fix it but that would be looking at the present. The long term data suggests that teams have a greater likelihood of winning hockey games by increasing their possession to increase shot rates. By doing one of either increasing rate of shots for, or reducing rate of shots agains the Jets might affect the other and in a good way. ‘Might’ being the key word.
Should that happen the dependency on Connor Hellebuyck and Steve Mason to perform at their current level is reduced. Great goaltending is a helluva drug. Whey you have it’s the best feeling ever, but when you don’t you’d do anything to get it. Ask the Canadiens’ fans, they must be needing a fix right now??
The balance for the Jets now is to adjust the parts of their game that reduce dependency on the .938 goaltending success from Hellebuyck. It’s been wonderful to watch and the optimist would hope it continues but the realist should know that there is some regression coming but hopefully not much.
Tonight’s lines based on the morning skate were reported as by Ken Wiebe:
Why mess with success right?
The Jets have a hot hand in Hellebuyck and should ride it, much like the smart change they made to the PP unit last game by putting Laine in the slot and Scheifele on the mid-left side. As for the Habs it’s hard to know what to make of them. Without Price being Price they are hardly what some would call formidable but they do pack some danger and have often bested the Jets, but that was then.
Montoya has only started 2 games and played in 3 with one loss and one win with a .873 save percentage. Lots of shots, lots and lots of shots at him would be the best thing to see. As for the Habs lines- still to be determined but I would suspect juggling and praying for anything from Julien at this point. Hopefully for the Jets the obvious travelling circus of long time fans from Montreal does not throw them off like the Leafs game did. Yeah, that’s the reason they stunk ;)
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