When the Tampa Bay Lightning assigned Kristers Gudlevskis to the Syracuse Crunch this past September, it was with the intention that he work on his consistency from game to game. They wanted him to learn how to be good even when he was not at his personal best.

There’s another caveat here, however, and that is that Gudlevskis has to learn how to be good even when the team in front of him is playing at their worst. The particular mix of chances that the Syracuse Crunch are allowing does affect Gudlevskis’s overall save percentage and Gudlevskis’s particular vulnerabilities are reinforcing that. Thus, when defense is good, goaltending is good and when defense falters, goaltending falters.

I looked at several of Gudlevskis’s games from January and February and tracked three full games to try to get a handle on exactly what kind of chances he was dealing with, using Steve Valiquette and Chris Boyle’s Red/Green shot categories as a basic template.

The idea, for those unfamiliar with that project, is that certain kinds of setups (moreso than shot location or shot type) make saving a shot more difficult. There are certain adjustments that affect the ability of a goaltender to make a particular save. In cases where these adjustments are required the goalie has less time to visually attach to the puck—around half a second or less—compared to shots where no such adjustment is required.

Valiquette delineated seven kinds of setups he considered most dangerous:

passes across the center of the ice (crossing a line he calls the royal road)

carries across the center of the ice

screens

deflections

one-timers on one side of the royal road

rebounds from the previous five types

broken plays of the previous five types

He calls these “green” shots and all other shots “red” shots. A team wants to generate more green and less red, according to Valiquette. Conversely, goalie should be given more credit for the difficulty of green shots than red shots.

I find this terminology counterintuitive. Red shots should be the most dangerous shots and green shots the least dangerous shots, but that’s a matter of semantics. More importantly, in trying to understand how plays develop on the ice, I found it useful to distinguish between the kind of setups that primarily exploit the goalie’s need to make physical adjustments and those that primarily exploit the goalie’s need to make visual adjustments.

Thus I used three different categories: lateral resets (royal road green chances), trajectory resets (non-royal road green chances), and non-resets (red chances).

Overall for the three games I tracked about 43% of the shots that Gudlevskis faced were “green”/reset chances. This is quite high, at least when compared to the levels found with NHL analyses of these types. Valiquette noted that in the NHL teams take about three times as many red chances as green chances. Thus Gudlevksis saw a significantly tougher workload than we’d expect. While it is definitely possible that I picked a particularly bad subset of games to sample, this should give some insight into at least that particular stretch of play (Jan 30 to Feb 13).

Chances Shots Goals SVP lateral resets RR Pass 5 0 1.000 RR Carry 5 2 0.600 trajectory resets screen/deflection/one-timer 13 5 0.615 broken play/net front scramble 9 0 1.000 All Green chances 32 7 0.781 all red 42 1 0.976 totals 74 8 0.892

Despite making up less than half of the chances he faced, goals on reset (green) chances accounted for 7 of the 8 goals that Gudlevskis allowed in the three games tracked. Most (5) were on deflections, one-timers, or screens.

In other words, Gudlevskis was more troubled by those situations where he was unable to track the puck adequately than by those where he was forced to move from a set position. He saw more of these situations and saved fewer of them (.772 compared to .800 on lateral resets), and they made up the bulk of the goals given up.

On the other hand, when given a clean line of sight and time to set up, Gudlevskis stopped all but one shot. All goaltenders should have greater success on these kinds of shots. But compared to other (NHL) analyses, Gudlevskis saw fewer of these chances and that affected his overall numbers.

A note on rebounds: there has been some concern that Gudlevskis is prone to giving up dangerous rebounds that the defense must then scramble to recover. I saw absolutely no evidence that this is a problem. The vast majority of rebounds Gudlevskis gave up were into the corners or away from traffic, and opponents rarely got second shots from those rebounds. Only 8 shots against came on rebounds and only one of those became a goal (and that one on a “royal road” carry).

It’s hard to say what kind of save percentage an AHL goaltender ought to have on any of these types of chances, but I would like to see Gudlevskis improve in the area of trajectory resets (deflections, screens, and one-timers). This appears to be the area where the most benefit would come from improvement given his particular workload. There is also a great deal of room for improvement in team defense in this particular area.

At any rate, Crunch fans, your eyes are not deceiving you about the state of the Crunch’s defense. At times, the Crunch are able to control the quality of shots in such a way as to help the goaltending, but when the failures occur they can have an enormous impact.