With the Olympic break on it feels like a great time to catch our breaths and take a little Oiler vacation. Many of you have already started taking these this season. Actually, more so than ever that is what I am hearing from fans who I never would have believed would stop watching games. Certainly if the Oilers don’t pull things together then they will absolutely have a problem moving forward. When the trust between the Customer and the Brand is broken it’s a hard thing to get back.
This franchise is held together with thumbtacks and Hope, and if the Hope starts to die off then those thumbtacks aren’t going to hold for long. The Oilers need to show some improvement eventually, and I think they might be poised to start after this break but 2 things need to happen.
1) They need their Goaltending of late to hold up.
2) They need to change the way they play and start spending more time in the offensive zone.
In this post I’m going to address the Goaltending a bit and in the future we’ll talk about possession and what the heck is happening there (or at least we’ll try, lord knows I don’t have all the answers).
THE BIG STORY
I think, to date, Goaltending has been the big story with the Oilers in the 2013-2014 season. Early in the year it was so bad that Edmonton was effectively out of the playoff race by November, now things have improved so much that one wonders where the team would be if they had been getting NHL quality goaltending all year. That said, there has been huge turnover in Net for the team. The two Goalies the club started with on opening day are gone and have been replaced completely.
In total the Oil have used 5 different netminders: Dubnyk, LaBarbera, Bachman, Bryzgalov, and Scrivens. As you can imagine, needing that many people to start games for you is a sign of big trouble. There were injuries, poor performances, and roster turnover. Looking back, it was complete chaos back there.
We can look at the goaltending numbers a few different ways but the go-to stat is going to be Save Percentage. This, so far, is the only stat that actually lets us know what the Goalie himself is doing. Goals Against Average is just taking that save percentage and multiplying it by shots allowed so really in the end it’s just save percentage muddied by a team metric (shots against) that the goalie has no control over. Shutouts are cool but there’s no differentiating between a 15 save shutout and Scrivens’ 59 save shutout. Until we have something better, save percentage is King.
All the numbers I will use are based only on the Starting Goalie’s numbers, so any work that a goalie did in relief is not counted. I wanted to look at what kind of goaltending Edmonton was getting out of its starters. This isn’t groundbreaking work, just Shots Against divided by Saves by starter over the 60 games that have been played slapped into an excel spreadsheet.
There are a few ways to break the numbers all down, so I will do my best to provide as many as possible, but all of them basically say the same thing: The Oilers could have had a flaming pile of garbage in net and conceivably done just as well up until the time Scrivens gets here.
In Total, Edmonton’s starting netminders have faced a total of 1856 shots against and made 1674 saves in that time for a less than stellar .902 Save Percentage. That is incredibly underwhelming and to think that number has been bumped up recently makes it that much worse.
INDIVIDUAL
Here are the individual lines for all of Edmonton’s Starters. I will go in order of Appearance because Film credits figured out the best way to do this long ago.
Dubnyk: SA 863 SV 770 SV% .892 LaBarbera: SA 100 SV 84 SV% .840 Bachman: SA 83 SV 76 SV% .916 Bryzgalov: SA 579 SV 525 SV% .907 Scrivens: SA 231 SV 219 SV% .948
What do we take away from those lines? Well for starters it shows just how much the Oilers depended on Dubnyk this year. Without other options he was the guy and even after Bryzgalov came into the fold he was given many starts. Dubnyk faced almost as many shots as Bachman, Bryzgalov, and Scrivens combined, but his inability to stop them spelled doom for both he and the club.
We should also recognize just how small the sample size is on Scrivens. He really hasn’t faced that many shots. He’s obviously taking his opportunities and running with them right now, but there are still 20 games to play and the longer the team waits to sign him the more information they’re going to have.
MONTH BY MONTH
Charting the goaltending performance by month is a natural way to look at things, so why don’t we do that too.
October: SA 419 SV 368 SV% .878 November: SA 332 SV 300 SV% .904 December: SA 484 SV 439 SV% .907 January: SA 476 SV 431 SV% .905 February: SA 145 SV 136 SV% .938
Well that certainly puts into perspective just how terrible October really was. I mean, that is truly remarkable in how abysmal it actually was. The Oilers in February were getting 60 points more out of their Goalie than they were at the start of the year. That right there is the difference between meaningful games played this year or not.
We can also see that after that terrible October things *somewhat* regulated to a more appropriate number. The low .900s are still very poor, but at least they’re NHL poor. One thing observers may want to note is that Scrivens’ record setting shutout came in January. If we wipe that game out completely then the January Save Percentage drops to .892 and it becomes clearer why that was the month that MacT pulled the trigger to get a new Goalie.
THIRDS
We’re at 60 games. We’ve seen month by month but let’s take a look at things broken down by intervals of 20 games.
01-20: SA 570 SV 501 SV% .879 21-40: SA 582 SV 530 SV% .911 41-60: SA 702 SV 643 SV% .913
Progress. That’s all I can call that. Things are getting better from the backend. What really stands out to me though, the Oilers went from the high 500s in shots against to 702 in the final 20 games. What the hell is going on there? Wait. That’s a topic for another day.
In regards to the Goaltending, we’re seeing that in these final 20 games, despite the fact that they have been busier, the Goalies have been stopping shots with an increased frequency. This should give Oiler fans a warm and fuzzy feeling about the direction things are going, but it actually may look a little better yet still.
TANDEMS
Breaking the goaltending to date down by Month, Individual, or even into thirds lacks any kind of context for the way things have really gone down in Edmonton. The reality is that there have been 3 different main tandems in net for the Oilers already this year. They do not fit exactly into any of the categories listed above but they are: Dubnyk/LaBarbera, Dubnyk/Bryzgalov, Scrivens/Bryzgalov.
It is the difference between these 3 separate tandems that might provide the most hope for Oiler fans looking ahead to the final quarter of the season.
Dubnyk/LaBarbera: SA 681 SV 606 SV% .890 Dubnyk/Bryzgalov: SA 781 SV 699 SV% .895 Scrivens/Bryzgalov: SA 394 SV 369 SV% .937
The current tandem is 40+ points higher than the two that came before it. Obviously the key was getting rid of Dubnyk, but as always the Oilers need time to see what they have here. I don’t expect that number to remain so high but as of right now those two are providing excellent goaltending and can no doubt claim responsibility for the team’s most recent turn around (5-3-2 in their last 10 games).
CONCLUSIONS
Well if you just scrolled down to the bottom then you’ve missed the obvious. The Oilers have been let down by their goaltending in a big way but never more so than in the early stages of the season. That said, even as things started to “normalize… they were never going back up to respectable levels until the Oilers went out and got Scrivens from LA.
I certainly would be questioning Freddy Chabot in the role of Goaltending Coach for the Oilers because it seems as though the netminders who he had the most influence over have floundered this season. Worse than that, their play was actually starting to dip again just before Scrivens arrived.
We can argue that the poor Oiler defense makes goalies look worse but that just doesn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny. Dubnyk left to play behind Shea Weber and still looked bad, maybe even worse, and Scrivens left the dominant (defensively) Kings and still put up numbers here. Good teams can get poor goaltending and poor teams can get good goaltending.
Here in Edmonton it appears as though we can look forward to solid Goaltending with the Scrivens/Bryzgalov tandem. That is a duo that the club might be able to use as a foundation to build on.
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