The Weakest Link

             

 

 

I’ll confess a certain level of amusement over the handwringing going on in the comments here, when it’s blatantly obvious that the biggest impediment to the Flames reaching the playoffs last season was a player that has received no mention at all. It’s a bit odd, really, that people are willing to agonize over the mediocre play of middling types like Stajan while never, ever discussing the elephant in the room. 

The primary reason the Calgary Flames watched the playoffs from the comfort of their homes was the substandard play of their number one goaltender, full stop. Miikka Kiprusoff seems to get an astonishing amount of slack from the local media and fans, but even a cursory examination of his 5v5 work last year should have given people the hint. The Flames were one of the stingiest teams in the league 5v5, allowing shots at a rate of 27.5 per 60, 4th best overall, and yet somehow finished 16th in 5v5 goals against. 

I’ve collected a wide range of data from Hockey Analysis to show just how badly served the skaters on the Flames were by their alleged elite goalie last year. First, here are the 5v5 shots for/against percentages for the regular goalies in the league when they were in net. I’ve included everyone that played at least 1500 minutes at 5v5 in 2011/12, covering 32 goalies, with the major starters and 1A types captured.

 

 

 

When Kiprusoff was in net, the Flames were outshooting their opposition by a fairly healthy rate, which runs contrary to the myth of a goalie battling insumountable odds. In other words, Kipper wasn’t exactly bombarded compared to his brethren. With that sort of shots ratio, the club should have been in pretty good shape 5v5.

 

So, what went wrong? The answer to that might be found in our man’s 5v5 save percentage:

 

  

 

That really isn’t up to snuff for a goalie that’s carrying the 5th highest cap hit amongst goalies, at least in my view. As an aside, a drop of one percent is likely worth about 12-15 goals against 5v5 for a regular goalie, since most of the main guys face between 1200-1500 5v5 shots.

Now, one of the common refrains is that the Flames ran up shot totals when they were chasing the game. With that noted, here are the shots for/against % when the game was tied for the same approximate cohort of goalies. For these next two tables, I’m using the filter of 750 5v5 tied minutes played during 2011/12 on Hockey Analysis, which gives me 27 goalies in total:

 

 

Again, Miikka wasn’t all that hard done by. The Flames actually controlled more of the shots when the game was tied than overall, and Kipper had the 6th best support of his peer group. Honestly, if your team is sporting a 53% shots for/against ratio when the game is tied, average goaltending should do the trick unless you have a season like New Jersey where nothing was going in the other team’s net for the first two months. At any rate, here are the SV% numbers in that game state for the same crew of goalies:

 

 

Oy. When the game was tied, as his team helped him more, he gave them less. The Flames were a middle of the pack SH% team at 5v5 overall and tied, by the way. Kipper had the 14th best SH% support overall and 13th best when the game was tied, so I have a hard time accepting any sort of argument that his team shot nothing but muffins while he faced unstoppable bullets. 

What should worry people the most is that Miikka Kiprusoff has been underwhelming for several years running by that last metric. I ran a four year composite of SV% for goalies that had played at least 3000 EV tied minutes since 2007/08. There are 19 goalies that met that threshold: 

 

 

Please note that included in that run was a .935 number in 09/10, which was 6th best amongst his peer group. As well, Kipper had the 5th best shots for/against ratio of those 19 goalies working in his favour, as well as the 5th highest team SH% in front of him during that 4 year run, so again, the team was giving him a reasonable amount of support in terms of shots and shooting percentage. 

 

There’s no nice way to put this, really. Miikka Kiprusoff has been at the heart of the failures of the Flames since 06/07. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that he had a very good 09/10 in the midst of this bad run, but that season is looking more and more as if it were an outlier rather than a bounce back year after being freed of the Iron One.

 

I have no problem in presuming Mr. Azevedo’s reportage from rookie camp is on the level, which suggests that Jay Feaster might not have been completely sincere in his past professions of belief that his number one stopper was of elite status. That’s the correct approach in my view, because no matter what people want to believe or what his cheerleaders might care to suggest, Miikka Kiprusoff hasn’t been within hailing distance of elite during the last several seasons.

 

That leaves the club with a fairly intractable problem for this year, since they weren’t able to move Kipper and they haven’t yet begun the dismantling of the club that next summer might well bring. Absent him pulling out a season from the depths of time, his recent work strongly hints that Miikka Kiprusoff will hinder whatever good the Flames’ skaters are capable of achieving in 2011/12.