Over the last few days, I’ve seen several people express the idea that the Lightning were struggling at this time last December and that a slump like this is nothing to worry about because the team will inevitably correct its course. This is a normal response to seeing a team that has been one of the best in the league over the past two seasons suddenly start struggling, despite having largely the same roster.
While I do understand the sentiment, it isn’t accurate.
The Lightning are on a similar pace to last season as evidenced by their record: 14-13-2 this year compared to 14-12-2 last year. But their path to arriving at that record has been much different. To illustrate this point, I have two graphs that help show how the team is playing at this point in the year compared to the same date last season. As usual, all data in this post is via corsica.hockey.
The graphs below show the change from last year on this date to this year. Each of these golf tee shaped objects represents a team. The blue tee is the Lightning while the rest of the tees represent the other 29 teams in the league for context. The small end of the tee shows where the team was last year on this date and the big end shows where they are this year. So we’re looking to see how different the team’s performance is from last year and whether that difference is positive or negative.
This first graph looks at shot share meaning: how many shots are the Lightning generating compared to how many they are allowing? Using the quadrant labels as a guide, we can see right away that the Lighting have moved from the “good” quadrant to the “bad” quadrant.
In a way, that tells the whole story on its own, but we can look a little further to see what’s driving that change. And in fact, the Lightning are both generating fewer shots and allowing more shots, which is resulting in them having a lower share of the shots overall and therefore being located unceremoniously in the “bad” section of the graph.
Shots aren’t the only metric we have available to us and we can conduct the same exercise using Emmanuel Perry’s expected goals statistic to see if we can learn any more about this change in the Lightning’s play. Expected goals considers several different pieces of information about each shot and determines its likelihood of becoming a goal.
We see a bit of a different story in this graph and in fact, a more pronounced change. Instead of moving from “good” to “bad”, the Lighting here move from “dull” to “bad.” And while the resulting location is similar, we can learn a couple of things from the difference between these two graphs.
For one, the Lightning are actually generating more expected goals than last year, which is interesting considering that they are generating fewer shots. This suggests that the shots they are generating are of a higher quality and therefore would be expected to lead to a slight increase in goals.
But even more interesting is the change in the defensive side of the expected goals calculation. While the Lightning were one of the best defensive teams in the league last season by expected goals against, they have fallen all the way to below average this season. Their drop in expected goals against is even more significant than their drop in shots against. This suggests that not only are they giving up more shots, but they are giving up higher quality shots, which leads to many more expected (and actual) goals against.
Given the previous two paragraphs, it shouldn’t be difficult to see that a slight improvement in offensive performance coupled with a major decrease in defensive performance is going to lead to worse overall results. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen and why many are expressing concern about the team’s play on the defensive end in particular.
Last year, the Lightning won games by being one of the best defensive teams in the league. They have not been able to replicate that style of play this season. Nor have they been able to generate enough offense to compensate for that drop in defensive effectiveness. And that’s why simply looking at the record and noting its similarity to last season does not tell us the whole story. The 16-17 Lightning are not playing like the 15-16 Lightning.
Acknowledging this leaves the team with several options on how to move forward. The first step along all of the potential paths is to improve defensively. While it seems unrealistic to think the team could replicate the outstanding defensive play from last season, they should be at least an above average team on that end of the ice.
And if we accept that they won’t play as well defensively, that means they will have to improve more on offense in order to compensate. And theoretically, that shouldn’t be an issue. This team has plenty of offensive talent and should be able to push the pace and outscore opponents regularly.
Ultimately, the onus for deciding how this 16-17 team will play is on the coaching staff. So far, we haven’t seen anything to suggest that they can suddenly return to their stellar defensive form from last season. So if the coaching staff continues to push that style of play, they risk continuing to see the same results we’ve seen all season.
But if they can find a way to turn this into a league-average defense while maximizing their offensive ability, they might be able to find a new identity that has a chance at being just as successful as the teams from the last two seasons.
