Seized from the Jaws of Defeat
The Panthers faced a two-goal deficit in the third period against San Jose on Saturday, which is a dangerous position for opponents to find themselves in. As we’ve seen in previous games at FLA Live Arena this season, Florida is a very difficult team to stop when they’re skating downhill. Remember the Cats’ comeback against the Capitals in late November?
Mackenzie Weegar missed a wide open net, and Carter Verhaeghe had a goal disallowed for offsides, and none of that even mattered. In the third period on Saturday, those stats looked like this:
Shot attempts: 26-12 Panthers
Shots on goal: 12-8
Expected goals: 1.93-0.6 Panthers
Actual goals: 3-1 Panthers
In total, Florida attempted 91 shots to the Sharks’ 44, with an 80-38 differential at 5v5. San Jose blocked 26 Panther shots (ouch). You can’t really fault James Reimer; his team gave up a whopping 6.03 expected goals in 61:08. That’s the third highest amount of expected goals a team has racked up in a single game this season. The cherry on top for Reimer came as exactly zero of his teammates paid any attention to Sam Bennett as he drove to the net to slam home Jonathan Huberdeau’s pass and win the game for the Panthers.
Bobrovsky on the Rebound
Statistics via Natural Stat Trick unless otherwise specified
Sergei Bobrovsky is having a big rebound season. His turbulent start to life as a Panther cost the team dearly, as Bobrovsky let in nearly 30 goals above expected in 81 appearances. It didn’t help that James Reimer, who the Panthers dumped for the salary cap space to sign Bobrovsky to a $70 million deal, was now on a different team outplaying his successor.
The pain Florida has felt from those two connected decisions has been eased this year by Bobrovsky’s much stronger play. In 31 appearances this season, Bob has saved 9.74 goals above expected. These publically available expected goals and saved above expected numbers are a helpful glimpse into how much goalies are helping their teams on a night-in, night-out basis.
I’m a little bit skeptical of this number when it comes to Bobrovsky, though. Among many other issues Florida observers had with his play in the first two years, Bob’s rebound control hasn’t been at the level you’d expect for a top tier goalie.
Kudos to @Range_Hockey, a project launched by goalie-turned-data scientist Cole Anderson, for creating this matrix. As the model explains, this data set removes goals saved above expected generate on rebounds, based on a model that projects expected rebounds a goalie would give up facing the shot selection of pucks heading on their net. It knocks down Bob’s performance a bit, but still clearly illustrates his value relative to many of the average or underperforming goalies in the league.
Sidenote: if I had a national platform I’d be writing about the completely insane season Ville Husso is having for St. Louis. Remember when he was a brick wall against the Panthers?
Tippett Over
According to 32 Thoughts co-host Jeff Marek, the central figure in most Florida Panthers trade talks going on right now is young right winger Owen Tippett, who has struggled mightily to get on the board this year. The Panthers originally drafted Tippett 10th overall in 2017, tantalized by his great wrist shot and prolific junior goal scoring. Tippett never really dominated the lower levels like NHL superstars typically did, but he put up enough points to make everyone think he would develop into a top 9 scoring winger at the NHL level. That hasn’t really happened yet, as Tippett has only tallied 31 points in 84 games since he became a more-or-less full time NHL-er at the beginning of the 2021 shortened season.
Tippett is still just 22 years old. There are obviously still tools Tippett possesses to turn himself into a much more effective NHLer than he’s played like thus far. Many Panthers observers believed this was the year things would come together for Tippett, who was a standout perfomer for the cats in pre-season.
In seeking out a new look, Tippett was removed from a line where he played with Sam Bennett and Jonathan Huberdeau, and in his place Anthony Duclair lined up on the right side of that line. The three of them were more productive together than the old third line had been, though that previous look had not necessarily failed. Huberdeau-Bennett-Tippett scored 4.4 goals per 60 minutes at 5v5, then Huberdeau-Bennett-Duclair increased their goals per 60 at 5v5 to 6.75. These are still the top two lines on the team with over 100 minutes played in that stat. Perhaps a more telling statistic lies in the expected goals, where the new look had only produced 2.69 xG per 60, and that mark shot up to 4.18 xG per 60 with Duclair. To be fair, the xG against per 60 also jumped from 2.53 to 3.33, the latter of which is the highest on the team for lines who’ve played at least 60 minutes.