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If you asked Senators fans what they thought of Erik Karlsson’s 2017-18 season, most of them would probably say that he was off, but that he picked it up at the end of the season. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s interesting to know
why people think that.
I definitely don’t think this past season was his best, but I also think it was better than the typical person would believe. Recovering from his injury definitely played a role in his early season “struggles,” and you can certainly point to a few points early on where it didn’t look like his stride was completely back.
However, a big reason why people think that he had a bad season is due to some horrendous luck, as well as some confirmation bias.
With the way that TV and social media covers the NHL nowadays, it is very easy for opinions of the few to become widespread beliefs that get solidified quite quickly. If Sportsnet runs a story on how Karlsson is struggling, fans outside of the Senators fan-base will believe it, casual fans will certainly believe it, and even fans who watch every single game will begin to
search for poor play from him.
Subconsciously, fans will be looking for Karlsson to make mistakes, and they will notice all the times he loses the puck or flubs a pass, but forget about the times that he makes an amazing play. In a sport like hockey where it is much harder to quantify a players overall worth (compared to baseball which has a stat for essentially everything), people will tend to follow the opinions of the masses, and if the media is saying that Karlsson is struggling, he must be struggling. So I think confirmation bias was incredibly strong this season.
It doesn’t help either that Karlsson was legitimately one of the most unlucky players in the league this year.
I’m not going to argue that he was as good as his previous Norris-caliber seasons, as he clearly looked off in the early going. However, his defensive gaffes are going to look exponentially worse when the puck always ends up in the back of the net five seconds later due to poor goaltending from Craig Anderson and Mike Condon.
Out of 427 skaters who played at least 800 minutes last season,
Karlsson ranked 3rd last in on-ice 5v5 SV% at 89.10%. So whenever he was on the ice, there was nothing but a sieve behind him. Karlsson obviously plays a lot, so when his goalies are playing that atrociously, it’s going to look like everything is his fault.
His on-ice SH% was about middle of the pack, so when you combine those two numbers, he sat 21st from the bottom in PDO at .970. Sometimes when a player has such abysmal shooting and save percentages, it can be due to lack of quality shots for or too many quality shots against, but there was nothing abnormal about Karlsson’s shot numbers. His +5.67% relative corsi was 20th in the league, his relative high-danger corsi was +3% (136th), and his relative scoring chance numbers were +2.42% (128th). The shot quality numbers are merely above average rather than elite, but they would still suggest that he should have been allowing
a lot fewer goals against.
I just don’t buy the argument that Karlsson was much worse than he normally is, because I guarantee if Anderson or Condon had stopped ~15 more shots than they would normally have, there wouldn’t be much discussion about a “subpar” season. Sometimes we try to analyze what went wrong with a players season, when in reality it can boil down to goaltender voodoo, and we have to make sure we understand percentages and how they can fluctuate wildly.
To put his season in perspective, let’s look at Karlsson’s previous on-ice SV%’s
throughout his career, in chronological order:
-89.62%
-91.10%
-91.93%
-94.58%
-91.57%
-92.38%
-90.96%
-92.75%
-89.10%
Are we really going to believe that this year’s 89.10% is completely Karlsson’s fault and that it is a sign of things to come? There’s a chance that Anderson and Condon are still bad goaltenders, but if Karlsson does endure another season of having sieves behind him, it most likely won’t be his fault. In all likelihood, that number will regress to somewhere near normal levels, because we know that it is incredibly unlikely for outliers in SH% or SV% to repeat great or terrible seasons.
My argument is not that Karlsson should be exempt from criticism and that he played amazing---in fact, I think he does deserve some criticism for his play at times. However, under normal circumstances, I doubt this season would have even been talked about that negatively.
He still had 61 points and was on pace for 72 in a full season, so if that’s a
down year, I’ll take that every day of the week.
It is a dangerous game always taking cues from TV and social media, because it’s so easy to be lazy and accept their opinions. And confirmation bias played such a big part in people not being happy with him, when in reality, he went through some horrendous luck.
I just really hope I can continue to write about Karlsson past the 2018-19 season, because even at his “worst,” he’s an incredible talent to watch.
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