The thing that stands out when you look at the stats for the four teams that are still left standing at this point in the season is save percentage.
There’s a lot to differentiate these teams from one another in a number of ways, but when it comes to play in the blue paint, very little separates them. Team save percentages for the season to date come in at .928, .927, .925, and .925. Those numbers rank fourth, fifth, and tied for seventh in the nation. When you look at it in terms of even-strength save percentage, the numbers are even closer: .938, .938, .938, .937. Only two teams bested those marks for the whole season.
So important is the quality of goaltending to outcomes in the NCAA tournament that if you were picking games based solely on one factor, and you chose even-strength save percentage alone, you would have been right 10 out of 12 times so far. The only outliers were BU (.938) beating Yale (.941), and Nebraska-Omaha (.937) beating Michigan Tech (.938).
In both cases, there were mitigating circumstances. BU has Jack Eichel’s line to power its offense, while Yale’s leading two leading scorers had 21 points. And Michigan Tech built its impressive numbers on the back of playing teams like Alaska-Anchorage and Alabama-Huntsville four times each.
But more important than those team numbers, of course, are the individual save percentages posted by the starters for each club. While we may learn something about overall suppression of shot quality on a team basis, the fact is that most of these guys — with the exception of Omaha’s Ryan Massa, who missed some time due to injury — played the vast, vast majority of their teams’ minutes this season.
From the NCHC, it’s Massa who leads the nation in save percentage, having crept into the top spot in a nominal tie with Yale’s Alex Lyon. But he also played just 67.8 percent of Omaha’s minutes this year. The workhorse of the group is Zane McIntyre, who played all but 43:19 for North Dakota this season, and is seventh in the country at .931 overall.
And their Hockey East counterparts are BU’s Matt O’Connor, at 81.9 percent of BU’s minutes and carrying a 15th-in-the-country save percentage of .928, and Providence College’s Jon Gillies, who has the 12th-best save percentage (.929) in 91.3 percent of the Friars’ available time on ice.
So as you can see, there’s not really a huge range of numbers there (11 points separate the best statistical goaltender in the nation from the 15th-best, and certainly the workload seems to be a factor there). And really, of the entire group, only Gillies and O’Connor struggled all that badly at any point this season.
That’s pretty tightly bunched, and certainly whatever issues Gillies had in the beginning and middle parts of the season were smoothed over by that Himalayan run relatively early on. These guys have, for the most part, stayed primarily in the middle, hugging pretty close to the .930-.935 range. Apart from McIntyre, they also seem to be on upswings in terms of quality of play, which you’d probably expect come tournament time.
So the question is how likely each goalie is to continue playing to this level? As has been explored many times before, any goaltender can have a good month, half, or even full season, but eventually it comes time to pay the piper.
I think you’d probably have to say that McIntyre and Gillies, the two drafted goaltenders here (by Boston and Calgary, respectively) are within acceptable ranges of what you’d expect in terms of quality from one season to the next. It’s tough to say how much goalies can improve from season to season in their early 20s, but you’d think improving your save percentage by 38 points doesn’t fall within that range. I’d be dubious of saying the same about a 12-point increase, but O’Connor, unlike Massa, has always been at least reliable for the Terriers.
Beyond the goalies
But it turns out that goaltenders, while certainly the most important single player on any team, aren’t necessarily the best all the time.
Of course, the possibility is that any goalie can lay an egg in any game of the season, let alone on this grand stage. Taking into account those rolling numbers is therefore key; you can see that McIntyre struggled in the NCHC tournament (that’s the big dip at the end), or that Gillies hit a pair of walls, or that O’Connor didn’t do very well mid- to late February. It happens to the best goalies in the world.
And at the college level, it’s easier for good teams to exert their will on worse ones, which is why factors beyond goaltender performance have to be considered as well.
It’s interesting that both semifinals break down as the two teams that seem the most similar. As you can see here, BU and North Dakota are separated in terms of PDO by a single point of shooting percentage (UND has the 8.8 percent to 8.7 percent edge there), while Providence has a whopping two-point lead on Omaha (via 7.5 percent to 7.4 percent shooting, and .938 to .937 save). And while PDO is far more a measure of skill in college hockey than the NHL, other factors obviously come into play.
BU generates shot attempts at a far greater rate than any other team left standing, and suppresses just about as well as North Dakota. Combined with the skill level we can observe through shooting percentage, it’s not unreasonable to say that McIntyre should be marginally busier than O’Connor (though here, too, you have to consider that North Dakota puts 54.4 percent of its shot attempts on net, compared with BU’s 52.3 percent).
These are about as evenly-matched as teams can be, with the only real difference being that BU plays a more wide-open brand of high-event hockey. One also has to wonder just how much of an impact the continued absence of a No. 1 center like Mark MacMillan will be, in terms of who matches up with Jack Eichel, and how they do it. “Depth” is talked about a lot with this North Dakota team, but anyone they have is likely to stand rather short in comparison with Eichel in terms of impact on the game. Unless you’ve played BU this year or, perhaps, BC last year, you just haven’t gone up against a player with the kind of singular ability to dominate a game that Eichel carries. Which is a big reason BU has a 55.2 percent CF%.
And here I’ll note my belief that the qualitative difference between Eichel and Johnny Gaudreau at this level is that Gaudreau’s game was far more predicated on turning nothing — a mediocre 3-on-2 carry through the neutral zone, an attacking-zone turnover, a failed clear, etc. — into a goal so quickly that defenses couldn’t believe it. Eichel just comes on the ice and wears you down; you just don’t carry the puck past the red line in most cases.
In the other semifinal is Providence and Omaha, two teams that, again, look to be similarly matched in terms of skill level (as long as you buy that Massa is really a .937 goaltender, which he absolutely isn’t).
But beyond that, these are two deeply different teams. One is an elite shot suppression team (only 39.6 attempts against per game) that dominates possession to the tune of 54.4 percent corsi, and the other is Omaha. They generate the fewest shot attempts of any Frozen Four team (42.6 per game), and allow the most (46.3), and that’s not a broad range or anything, but over the course of a season it adds up to a 47.9 percent CF%, which was, ahem, “good” for seventh of eight teams in the NCHC, and 45th of 59 nationally.
Omaha also had a pretty easy road to the Frozen Four after having been knocked out of the NCHC tournament early, beating a banged-up and overachieving Harvard, then Atlantic Hockey postseason champion RIT. They were outattempted 126-89 on the weekend (41.4 percent).
Gun-to-my-head prediction
If I had to guess, and I don’t so I’m doing this out of the kindness of my heart, I’m picking the two Hockey East schools to win the semis.
Wow, I know, so biased against the NCHC. Except those Eastern teams are the best possession teams left, with the best goaltending, and the most prolific offenses, in their respective games. (BU probably wins the whole damn thing for the same reason.) This is just playing the numbers and whatever, because the odds are that the better team wins any individual game. It’s not really going out on a ledge to say that the teams with the best stats are going to pull out victories.
And they might not! Because in single-elimination tournaments, funny things happen all the damn time. The best teams don’t always win, and so on. For example, Omaha got to the Frozen Four. It’s crazy!
A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)
1. BU
2. North Dakota
3. Providence
4. Nebraska-Omaha
5. Denver
6. Minnesota-Duluth
7. St. Cloud
8. RIT
9. Miami
10. Yale
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and also covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is hereand his Twitter is here.
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