The play of Philipp Grubauer in the early stages of the season for the Seattle Kraken has been a hot topic among fans. We’ve mostly defended him, because we know there’s a lot of context to consider for goalies and because we know he’s better than what he’s been showing. We also wondered if the analytics on what he’s been giving up were as bad as the eye ball test was indicating.
For this week’s data dump, let’s dig into the analytics around Grubauer’s performance to date and see if there are any insights to gain. I am a little afraid of what I might find.
Quality of shots
Last week, I touched on shots and shot quality when evaluating the team’s performance. This week I am flipping the script and evaluating how good Grubauer has been at saving shots at the various quality categories defined by Natural Stat Trick and how that save percentage relates to his peers.
The shot quality categories I am going to look at are high, medium, and low danger shots. How a shot fits in those categories is related to distance and angle from the net. The closer and more square to the net a shot is taken, the higher the danger category.
I isolated all goalies who have played six or more games this season and plotted their save percentage by shot category. (All shot quality data is from NaturalStatTrick.com.)
Yikes. His numbers look poor when compared to the rest of the league, and I imagine even Grubauer himself would admit he has been struggling this season compared to last season. For anyone paying attention, particularly the last few games, this should not come as a surprise.
Let us look at how his numbers compare to last season.
Ok, it’s clear that Grubauer is struggling. The real question is why is he struggling?
Learning a system?
The Kraken are going through a rough patch with three losses in a row including a loss to, at the time, the winless Arizona Coyotes. I took that loss to the Coyotes tougher than I would have expected for Game 12 of 82 in the inaugural season. As they say, it is better to feel the pain than to feel nothing at all.
After the Arizona game there was a lot of discussion online about Grubauer’s performance in the crease this season, but on Saturday night, there was one tweet that stood out:
Kraken fans: The first time I ever interviewed Philipp Grubauer was in his first few months with Colorado and he’s been… just all right, and admitted as much to me. Said he’s big into getting comfortable with a system and it takes him a while to settle in with a new team.
For those that don’t know, Cat Silverman is a well respected writer and goalie analyst, so when she tweets something like this, I read it. It was an interesting perspective. I’ve always been under the impression that the strategy is to stop the puck, no matter what personnel or “system” is in front of you, and I never thought that a goalie must learn those systems as well.
While doing my soul searching in the aftermath of the Arizona game, I started to dig into the data to see if Cat’s tweet held any water.
I looked at save percentage by game, comparing Grubauer’s 2018-19 season, his first in Colorado when he would have been learning the systems there, to the 2021-22 season.
If you look at Grubauer’s first half of his first season in Colorado, you can see the inconsistency in the graph with a lot of games with a save percentage in the .700’s and .800’s. At least directionally, this seems to validate Cat’s tweet that Grubauer needs time to settle into a new system.
Give him time
Grubauer has been a very good goalie over the last few years and a goalie does not turn into a pumpkin between seasons. There were a lot of people that claimed Grubauer was a bust in the first part of his first season in Colorado, but he ended that regular season with a .917 save percentage and then had a .925 save percentage in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Goaltending can and will be frustrating at times, but I am going to give Grubauer more time to settle in before making a full assessment of his performance.
If you have any questions, insights, or feedback, let us know in the comments section.
Through the first eleven games of their inaugural season, the Seattle Kraken find themselves at 4-6-1 and at the bottom of the Pacific Division standings. We at Sound Of Hockey are bullish on how they have been playing lately, so we decided to dig into the numbers to identify any trends and validate if our sense of optimism is justified.
Goals scored and goals against
Through the Nov. 5 games, Seattle is tied for 19th in average goals scored per game and 25th in average goals scored against. Those numbers reconcile with their record, but the goals against number is a bit surprising considering most media outlets forecasted the Kraken would be a strong defensive team.
Let us look at these same numbers by game so we can evaluate if the Kraken are trending in the right direction.
Even with Edmonton scoring five goals against the Kraken in game 10, the average goals against has been declining. This is a trend we like to see.
The goals scored is slowly trending in the right direction as well. Up until the game on Thursday against Buffalo, the team was feeling snakebitten after getting Shesterkinned against the Rangers last Sunday and having several near misses against the Oilers on Monday.
Shots taken and shots against
At 29.5 shots per game, the Kraken are 25th in the league, which correlates very well with their goals per game. On the other side, they are averaging the lowest number of shots against in the league which should be considered a very positive sign.
Here are how those numbers project by game.
These trends should give Kraken fans a sense of optimism. Shots for (taken) per game have been on a steady incline while shots against have been on a steady decline. The Kraken have outshot their opponent over the last six games, and if they can maintain that trend, they should start winning more games than they lose.
High-danger and medium-danger shot quality
Of course, it is not always about quantity, as sometimes you need to consider the quality of the shots being taken. To analyze the quality of shots we’re going to look at five-on-five high-danger and medium-danger shot counts by game.
The concept is relatively simple. A high-danger shot has a higher likelihood to go in than medium- or low-danger shots. We’re probably stating the obvious here, but ideally you would have more high-danger shots than medium- or low-danger shots to increase your chances of scoring goals. This data was pulled from NaturalStatTrick.com, a valuable resource if you ever want to know more about the advanced analytics of hockey.
This trend should be considered positive and could be the impact of the “learning to play together” narrative of an expansion team that is compiled of a bunch of players that had limited playing time together before this season.
Wrapping it all up
This is a case where the eye test is aligning to the analytics. We do not like to get pollyannaish about the team’s outlook, but there are some objective signs in the analytics that this team is getting better and is trending in the right direction. It will be interesting to continue to monitor these trends and see if the goals and therefore wins start to follow.
If you have any questions, insights, or feedback, let us know in the comments section.
With the NHL season less than a month away, we thought we should revisit the Seattle Kraken schedule to see how it stacks up with the rest of the league across a few different metrics. Specifically, we are going to look at total travel distance over the season, the number of road trips, and the number of back-to-back games the Kraken will face this year compared to their NHL counterparts.
Travel distance
Being that Seattle is in the corner of the United States, there is room for concern that the Kraken will be traveling quite a bit in a typical NHL Season.
The Seattle Kraken will travel the eighth-most miles in the NHL this season with 49,566.
Another way to look at this is to consider how the Seattle Kraken travel compares to that of their divisional rivals and how the other divisions stack up against one another.
It is interesting to see the Pacific Division has the tightest cluster of travel distances by team. This bodes well for the Kraken, as they will be on a relatively level playing field with their closest rivals in this respect.
Also, this is unrelated, but it is interesting to see Washington as such an outlier in the Metropolitan Division.
Number of road trips
Distance is one aspect of the travel schedule, but we should also look at the quantity of road trips a team might have on the schedule.
In the number of road trips category, Seattle has the second-fewest trips behind only the Vancouver Canucks. This should be a good thing for Seattle Kraken players, although it will mean a few long stretches away from home, including to start the season.
Back-to-back games
Finally, we need to consider back-to-back games, as this ends up being a factor for every NHL team.
Playing on consecutive nights can be tough on teams in general, but the biggest impact is on goaltending. It is quite rare for the same goalie to play both games of a back-to-back scenario, so it is important for a team to have a strong goalie tandem should they have a lot of back-to-back games.
In Seattle’s case, they have 15 back-to-back game scenarios. It is a good thing the Kraken have one of the best goalie tandems in the league in Philipp Grubauer and Chris Driedger. Additionally the third goalie, Joey Daccord, has proven he can play in the NHL should there be a an injury to Grubauer or Driedger.
Bonus content
Because I had access to the data, I thought I would share this distribution of road trips and home games throughout the season.
Down the stretch, the road trips and homestands are shorter than those of the first half of the season. This should have a positive impact on the team’s performance on the ice as they hopefully make a push for the playoffs.
Success in the regular season has a lot of variables and constraints beyond the challenges of the schedule, but we will continue to monitor the team performance based on some of these scenarios.
Hope you enjoyed this different perspective of the 2021-22 Seattle Kraken schedule.
Opinions about the Seattle Kraken roster are all over the map. Some people project them to be second in the Pacific Division while others think this group leaves much to be desired, but no one really knows how they will be until they get some games under their belt. It is always fun to remind people, however, that no one projected the success of the Golden Knights in year one. With this in mind, we thought it would be a nice exercise to compare the offensive statistics of the Seattle Kraken and Vegas Golden Knights rosters heading into their respective inaugural seasons.
Centers
Vegas’ top centers going into the 2017-18 season were Jonathan Marchessault, William Karlsson, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Cody Eakin, and Brandon Pirri. Vegas also had Vadim Shipachyov on the roster, but for the purposes of this exercise, we are excluding him from the analysis.
The Seattle Kraken roster has eight players that could play center, but for the purposes of this exercise, we are assuming Calle Jarnkrok and Alexander True will either play wing or in True’s case not be one of the top five centers. Marcus Johansson will also likely play some of each, but we’re counting him as a center here. That leaves Alex Wennberg, Yanni Gourde, Johansson, Colin Blackwell, and Morgan Geekie as the comparable group to Vegas.
Here is a quick look at how the teams stack up against each other, using stats from the year before each club’s inaugural season (i.e., 2016-17 for Vegas, 2020-21 for Seattle).
Offensively, the Kraken’s centers look substantially better than the Golden Knights’ centers looked heading into their first season.
Here is a breakdown of goals per game by player.
Marchessault was a big standout with 30 goals in the prior season before joining the Golden Knights for 2017-18. He put up similar numbers during the 2017-18 campaign with 27 goals. Meanwhile, Karlsson was the big surprise for Vegas, going from six goals in 2016-17 to 43 goals in 2017-18 or .52 goals per game.
Wings
Looking at the wings in Vegas for that inaugural season, we are including Alex Tuch, David Perron, Erik Haula, James Neal, Oscar Lindberg, Reilly Smith, Tomas Nosek, and William Carrier. Vegas added Ryan Carpenter on waivers and acquired Ryan Reaves and Tomas Tatar around the trade deadline late in the season. Because they were not on the roster to start the season, they are excluded from the analysis.
For Seattle, we are including Brandon Tanev, Calle Jarnkrok, Jaden Schwartz, Jared McCann, Joonas Donskoi, Jordan Eberle, Mason Appleton, and Nathan Bastian. As mentioned above, Blackwell or Johansson will probably play wing from time to time, but we already included them in the center category and did not want to double count. Jarnkrok, McCann, Bastian, and Appleton can all play center as well, but for now we are slotting them in at wing.
Here is a look at the numbers.
Like the centers, Seattle’s wingers look better heading into their inaugural season than the Golden Knights wing corps before their inaugural season.
Here is a look at the player detail of goals per game.
Vegas saw big increases in production from Haula, Smith, and Tuch. Collectively they would add 36 more goals in 2017-18 than they produced in 2016-17.
Defense
For the defensive group in Vegas, we are including Deryk Engelland, Colin Miller, Nate Schmidt, Brayden McNabb, Luca Sbisa, Shea Theodore, Jon Merrill, and Brad Hunt. For Seattle we are including Mark Giordano, Adam Larsson, Jamie Oleksiak, Vince Dunn, Connor Carrick, Haydn Fleury, Carson Soucy, and Jeremy Lauzon.
Seattle’s defense is commonly regarded as the strength of the team, and it certainly shows in the offensive production numbers in the graph. Here is the player breakdown.
Vegas only saw a mild increase in goal production from their defensive corps during the 2017-18 season.
Seattle is not Vegas
Looking at goals, assists, and points per game is a very simple way to evaluate the Kraken roster and should not be taken as a testimonial that Seattle will be better than Vegas in season one. Vegas really took advantage of some players having career years during the 2017-18 season.
Are there players in Seattle that can have similar breakout years? TBD, but in the meantime the Kraken roster looks more productive offensively than a lot of people think.
