Slicing and Dicing the Jets: What happened to the Jets at Evens?

The Winnipeg Jets missed the playoffs for the fourth time in five seasons since the move to Manitoba, and the 14th time over 16 seasons over franchise history. The season does not end for us though at Jets Nations.

Welcome to our series where we take an analytical approach, dissecting what went wrong with the Jets 2015-2016 season and how to improve the team for next year.

This time for our series, we look at the Jets performance for even strength.

The Jets have been a pretty average at evens for their tenure in Winnipeg. Combining all 5 seasons the Jets have held a 50.8 Corsi%, 50.5 expected Goal%, and a 50.2 Goal%. In other words, the team has slightly outshot the opposition, were expected to slightly outscore, and did slightly outscore (by 5 goals).

Realistically, a team like that at even strength should make the playoffs more often than not in a league where more than half make the post-season. Sure, they would unlikely be a perennial contender, but not a four games and zero wins in the playoffs over five seasons either.

The Jets’ even strength performance, while still out of the red, took a step back by every measure:

The Jets did not really do anything substantially “wrong” or perform “poorly” at even strength. The team was still above 50%, which should be enough to make the playoffs, provided everything else is also average or better.

While the Jets slightly outperformed their underlying numbers at evens by a few goals last season with their 54.1% goal share being above their expected percentage, they under performed this year by about a goal or two this year with being perfectly even for 5v5 minutes.

In our last portion of the series, we looked at how many goals worth in value did the Jets change in shot volume and shot conversion was worth when keeping all other factors constant:

While the Jets generated more shot volume at 5v5, their team was about 22 goals worse overall for 5v5 minutes. On average, this works out to a loss of three-to-four wins in the standings.

The Jets improvement in generating more offensive chances came at a cost, with the team allowing three shots against in exchange for every shot generated they improved by.

We can take a look at the highest to lowest ranked forwards in 5v5 ice time, and compare how each did in Corsi%:

As you can see, the Jets dropped in performance on nearly every player.

The loss of Michael Frolik severely hurt the Jets’ forward depth. Drew Stafford replaced a mix of Evander Kane and Stafford. Adam Lowry had a struggled without being protected by Frolik and Matthieu Perreault on each side. Alexander Burmistrov’s addition served as no service to the Jets and did not perform as his normal effective self until well after the All-Star Game break. Andrew Ladd, who was recovering from injury despite playing through, had a stark drop in performance as well.

And while the two did not play a significant number of games for the Jets, veteran forwards Lee Stempniak and Jiri Tlusty provided a boost in depth and insulated the Jets weaker players, creating a positive feedback effect throughout the team.

We can then look at the same thing for defenders:

The Jets experienced essentially no change with the uncontested best performer; Dustin Byfuglien has consistently been dominant at evens for years, provided he’s not placed at forward where he gets lost without the puck on his stick.

Other than that, the Jets dropped pretty convincingly across the board. While Tobias Enstrom and Tyler Myers were fairly similar to years prior, Jacob Trouba and Mark Stuart saw an extensive drop from last season.

While Trouba’s performance when away from Stuart essentially saw no change, Stuart’s accelerating fall in performance and ability has been pulling Trouba down with him.

Trouba has been admirable with pulling Stuart at least above 50% (which very, very, very few defenders have done over Stuart’s career), but Trouba can only carry so much, and the young defender has hidden a player that likely has fallen below the NHL talent line for quite some while:

The bigger loss though was in goal conversion, accounting for nearly 19 goal decline. Was this the Jets fault (read: skill and systems)? Was this just uncontrollable factors (read: luck, variance, and opposition goaltending)? Or was it some combination of the two?

In terms of shot volume, the 2015-2016 Jets did generate more relative to the league and relative to their previous season. However, the Jets actually did worse in generating shots from the high-danger area, or the low slot. Last season 53 percent of the NHL’s even strength goals came from the low slot and is an exceptionally important area to attack and defend.

While the Jets’ shot volume did increase, their distribution suggests we should expect a drop in shooting percentage, which we did see. Interestingly, Corsica’s expected goal modeling that uses shot distance, angle, and many other factors to determine shot danger, estimated that the Jets’ drop in shot quality should have garnered a 0.13 percentage point fall in unblocked shooting percentage. The Jets’ unblocked shooting percentage fell 0.12 percentage points.

This suggests the drop in shooting percentage is almost completely driven by shot quality, which could been brought upon by system or team inability to follow system.

What about with goaltending?

Despite popular belief, the Winnipeg Jets have been an average to above average defending team throughout their tenure, while last season the Jets were essentially elite in defending. When we look at the change in the shot location rates, we see that the Jets defending worsened in both shot volume and shot quality.

The Jets unblocked-shot save percentage fell by 0.6 percentage points as expected with the Jets failing to keep shots to the outside as effectively. However, when we unblocked-shot save percentage with expected goal models, the Jets’ goaltending adjusted performance (save percentage relative to shot quality driven expectations) falls by about 0.47 percentage points.

This suggests the Jets’ drop in save percentage is almost completely driven by goaltender performance, as opposed to player and system defensive issue.

The good news is that the Jets can rebound effectively and quickly.

The young-skill injection should help the Jets in the long run as these players develop, especially Nikolaj Ehlers who showed flashes of dominance. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect heavy bounce back seasons from both Lowry and Burmistrov, the latter of which showed some in the last quarter of the season.

That said, there are some issues that need to be cleaned up. The largest is goaltending as Ondrej Pavelec has proven time-and-time again that he is not capable of being trusted with the starter role. The team could also use a cleaning up in the defensive zone and a reversion to their defensive game in 2014-2015.