5 Things: Breaking Down the First Third of the Season
Diving into goaltending, the penalty kill, and more.
We’re a third of the way through the season now, and there’s much to talk through. I figured I’d bring back a good-old “5 Things” style recap from last year to break it all down. Let’s jump in:
1. Goaltending
It’s somewhat of the elephant in the room at the moment. With Watson out injured, the goaltending situation has been in serious limbo. For what it’s worth, Cherepak has had a couple of really good games. The 4-2 win up in Clarkson was, in large part, due to his performance in net. He just hasn’t been able to hit that level consistently enough.
Combine injury and inconsistency, and you end up with an 85.5 team save percentage. Per Instat’s Expected Goals model, RPI has given up around 15 goals more than expected. Not great.
The team is basically starting every game already down 1-0. It’s an unfortunate reality of hockey. There’s not much else that matters during a goaltending slump. It’s just a lot harder to win.
Ironically, on the other end of the ice, RPI is shooting at around 12%, which is fourth best in the country. This helps offset the save percentage a little bit, but not by much.
2. The penalty kill can’t stay like this forever, right?
Short answer: Probably not.
Long answer: The penalty kill is currently sitting at 66.2%, which I don’t need to tell anyone is real bad. To quantify it a bit more, here are the current penalty kill numbers compared with the previous four seasons.
Here’s the thing: having a sub 70% penalty kill percentage would be historically bad. It just rarely happens in college hockey. In all likelihood, the success percentage will get better as the season goes along and while it may not ever be fantastic, it will at least be a little better than it is now.
For one, you have to factor in the level of opponent here. RPI has faced their fair share of top-10 teams this season, and those teams have powerplay units with elite guys: the likes of Cutter Gauthier, Collin Graf, and the Nadeaus. The talent gap is wide in those situations and those teams do a great job of capitalizing on it.
Second, the personnel on the kill is not drastically different from what it was last season. Hallbauer and Klee are the two big losses (those two, Strom and Sertti took most of the shorthanded minutes on defense), but the rest of the penalty kill contingent is largely the same.
And while the success rate for last year’s group was not great either, their underlying numbers (Shorthanded xGA/Game) were actually quite decent - comparable with the 2021-22 and 2019-20 seasons that had great success.
So it’s not ridiculous to say this group can figure it out. Most of them have done it before. Just need some good goaltending and a bit of luck.
3. Tyler Hotson’s Recent Play
Coming into the season, Dave talked about Tyler Hotson as being one of the most talented recruits who had come in during his time at RPI. Then, he absolutely dominated in the exhibition game vs. Union. He legitimately looked like the best player on the ice.
But then came the start of the regular season, and things quieted down a little for Hotson. He got on the scoresheet, but some of his underlying metrics (as with the whole team) were way down.
He has since turned that around.
His scoring still hasn’t popped yet, but his underlying numbers have taken a complete 180° turn. He’s gone from getting crushed in shot quantity (Corsi) and shot quality (xGF) metrics to dominating them. He now leads the team in xGF% and is second (only behind Jake Lee) in Corsi. And when you have underlying metrics like that, the scoring will come.
In many ways, it’s reminiscent of the path Muzzatti took last year, where he took some time adjusting to the college game in the first half, but once it clicked, he was off to the races.
4. Shot Assists, Passes to the Slot, and Other Passing Metrics
Passing is one of the statistics that I think is under-utilized in hockey when analyzing players. We (myself included) tend to focus heavily on Expected Goals, mostly because these models are well-established, good indicators of player impact.
But what about Expected Assists? What about the player who makes the pass that sets up a xG chance? Surely, they should get an some xA value associated with that play. Some likelihood that the pass they made ends up in an assist.
xA models are actually common in the soccer analytics world, but they just haven’t really made their way over to hockey just yet. What we do have instead are some passing metrics from Instat that aren’t as good as a true xA model would be, but that can still provide some good insight.
Here are two:
A shot assist is given to a player when they make a pass to set up a shot for another player. Instat even calls them “pre-shot passes,” but I think shot assists sounds way cooler.
“Passes to the slot” is self-explanatory, but the key difference is that the result from a pass to the slot does not necessarily have to be a shot.
Ryan Brushett leads the team in shot assists and is fourth in PTTS. It makes sense that he also leads the team in assists. The underlying numbers show just how many passes he is making that create good looks on net.
As always, there is the caveat that all these kinds of statistics must be taken in context. But I think these passing numbers, in particular, add a useful layer when analyzing a player. They help show who the playmakers are. And those are nearly just as important as the goal scorers.
5. A Few Final Notes on the Weekend
Here’s our classic stat-dump on the weekend for both games with a few notes:
The xG battle was close at even strength, but Quinnipiac really flexed their strength in the special teams battle.
In a vacuum, this is really not a bad performance against the defending National Champions. It’s just that all of the games against strong teams have gone this way so far. There’s a moral victory to take here and there, but that’s about it.
This was the first game of the season that RPI won the xG battle and only the second in which they had more shot attempts (Corsi) than the opposition.
Unfortunately, this was also the first game of the season that RPI lost despite the xG going in their favor.