Funny thing is, the more I look deeper into the Flames struggles, the more confused I am.
To the eye test and my own logic, I can't see three goalies equally struggling as bad as they seem to be right now. When that happens there's likely a non goaltending reason. Seems more like brain farts and defensive breakdowns are the culprit, along with goaltending. It's highly improbable that a Goalie with a higher than average career save % posts numbers that are far below replacement on his own (sample size alert), nevermind three goalies doing that at the same time. The chances are slim that all three goalies forgot how to play goal over a 4 month span.
The stats tell a much different story. War on Ice keeps track of High Danger Scoring Chances and those are shots from areas that have a much higher chance of going in as well as shots off the rush which also go on at a much higher rate. The Flames actually have a positive differential, which means they've had more of these chances than their opponents have. Even regular scoring chances have the Flames up over their opponents. They're in the top half of the league in both chances for and against. Before someone talks about "score adjusted" numbers it doesn't matter in this context as we're discussing past goal differential, not predicting the future. There's no statistical explanation with currently available numbers for the historically bad GAA except historically bad goaltending.
This leads me to believe it's a combination of things: horrible luck, noise in the numbers, small sample size and low confidence. The good news is that means this historically bad stretch should end and the Flames should play better. The downside is there's nothing to suggest they'll play well enough to dig out of this hole and there's a very little chance they'll make the post season this year. It looks like the Flames are getting results before where their play suggests they should be, but they'd have to play waaaaay better to go on the type of run they'll need to make it
|