So far this season the Leafs have been all about culture change and process. Mike Babcock and his new coaching staff have swept in with a plan and they are implementing it as quickly as possible. For the skaters, early returns on the underlying numbers are definitely on the side of good to great. Possession has drastically improved. The team is giving up far fewer dangerous scoring chances against and is near the top of the league in shots for per game.
All of this should make life easier for the duo between the pipes, James Reimer and Jonathan Bernier. Every once in a while, under the Randy Carlyle regime, one of the two would quip about a lack of communication with the coaching staff or the nightly barrage they were facing from the opposition.
Yet in the early stages of the Babcock era, neither goalie seems to be benefiting from the lighter workload. Bernier in particular is struggling with some ugly goals against.
When assessing a goaltender’s performance relative to the rest of the NHL, it helps to adjust the save percentage of each goalie in the league to reflect how they would perform against an average distribution of low, medium and high danger shots. Of the 36 goalies who have played 200 or more 5v5 minutes this season, Bernier ranks 25th (.904) and Reimer 31st (.893) in War-On-Ice.com’s Adjusted SV%. They’ve played better than Vezina winners Sergei Bobrovsky and Tuukka Rask, and Vezina finalist Semyon Varlamov so far, but that doesn’t provide much consolation to a team looking for consistency in goal.
What should be reassuring to Leafs fans is that of the three danger levels of shots mentioned above, a goaltender’s High Danger SV% is a more repeatable and reliable indicator of goaltender skill than the other two. Here is where Bernier actually ranks relatively well so far this year. It may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s good he’s stopping the hard ones despite letting in the occasional easy goal.
We expect Low Danger and Medium Danger SV% to move around a fair bit over the course of the season – they are both quite unpredictable, but generally most goaltenders will end up within a fairly narrow range. The chart shows the lowest and highest SV% in each danger zone for goalies with 2000+ minutes since the 2010-11 season:
This is where things get a bit bizarre for Bernier. So far this season he has the worst Low Danger SV% in the NHL for goalies with 200+ minutes at .8906. No other starter in the league has a Low Danger SV% below .924. It is hard to over-emphasize how rare it is to have a five-game stretch with a Low Danger SV% that bad.
Over the past five years among all NHL goalies there have only been 80 five-game stretches where a netminder has posted a Low Danger SV% under .8906 – and that’s out of 12,852 samples of this size. Essentially, Bernier’s five-game stretch is something we should expect to see once every three or four years from any starter.
Many of the top goalies in the NHL have had a stretch like this within the past five years, including Carey Price, Henrik Lundqvist, Braden Holtby, Jonathan Quick and Pekka Rinne. Although virtually none of them have done it more than once. Even if we assume Bernier posts a Low Danger SV% of .940 this season, which would be the worst total for any starter over the past five years, his numbers would drastically improve over the remainder of the year.
Assuming Bernier continues to roughly face the same distribution of Low, Medium and High Danger shots he’s faced so far this season over another 50 starts, he would end up with around 684 Low Danger, 352 Medium Danger and 396 High Danger shots at the end of the season. If we assume he finishes with an abysmal Low Danger SV% of .940 he would need to allow another 34 Low Danger goals this season – a total of 41 on the year.
So far his High Danger SV% is .8611, which ranks 11th in the NHL. Bernier’s Medium Danger SV% of .9688 is also stellar and currently ranks fifth in the NHL. While it is good that he is posting such miraculous numbers in the higher danger areas, it is unlikely they’ll remain this high all season due to the highly variant nature of SV%. But because Bernier’s Low Danger SV% is so bizarrely poor, is overall SV% is bound to recover.
Adding up the projected totals, Bernier’s SV% would end up around .907, which is still well below NHL average (.911) and not very good by any means. But it would still be comparable to what Jimmy Howard (.910) and Ryan Miller (.910) produced for playoff-bound clubs last season in 53 and 45 starts, respectively.
But remember, this assumes Bernier would post literally the worst Low Danger SV% in the NHL over the past five seasons, which is highly unlikely. If he instead posted a Low Danger SV% of around .950 or .960 (he’s never been below .960 as a starter), his season-long SV% would end up around .914 to .919, which is above the NHL average.
Worst-case scenario, Bernier finishes with a mediocre season compared to other starters around the NHL. Realistically, he’s going to finish the season somewhere above the NHL average as things regress towards career averages.
Toronto’s situation in goal may look bleak, but it’s likely to improve. It makes sense to ride out the string of bad luck Bernier has had on long distance shots so far.
