I tweeted this last night, but as Kris Martel so “helpfully” pointed out, I could have blogged it. I guess this way it sticks around for a while, for better or for worse.

Context: Andrei Vasilevskiy started for the Tampa Bay Lightning against the Arizona Coyotes. The Coyotes aren’t a great team (they have some interesting players but they’re not good as a team yet.) The Lightning were mostly able to control play until the third period. Then they started to sit back. Eventually Vasilevskiy let in a goal off a faceoff.

There was some talk about the goal on twitter, about whether it was a good or bad goal to give up. Here’s my response.

The kid had a good game. I don’t mean to imply that he didn’t. But I didn’t like the goal against, and here’s why:

There are two basic elements to goaltending: knowing where to be and getting there. They work together. In general, Vasilevskiy’s great at the things that get him where he needs to go. His issues lie in knowing where to be.

In order to know where to be, you have to be able to both read plays, which is the NHL learning curve, and track the puck. He’s learning to read plays.

The NHL is different than the AHL in large part because of how the players think the game, the options they can create. Those options multiply rapidly when a defensive play breaks down, as it does for the Lightning often. The Lightning are very hard on goalies.

When the Bolts give him plays he can read Vasilevskiy does well. They’re real bad, though, about the kinds of mistakes that affect reads. Most of the time, when he puts up those games with 4 or 5 goals against, it’s because he can’t read and anticipate because there’s no structure, no pattern. So he gets screwed. He gets screwed because he’s not tracking the puck, he’s just reading the play.

In the AHL, after a rocky start to the season he made a kind of mental leap that led to rapid improvement. In essence, he learned to read the plays, anticipate where to be, and get there. He didn’t have to track the puck to be in the right place. He could foresee the options, even when things went bad.

That strategy is not working as well for him now. There are too many options, especially when plays go bad. And that goal was a prime example. He knew where to be in general, but couldn’t adjust properly to the change when it was deflected. He didn’t track it. And in fact while trying to adjust, he actually opened up the hole that it went through.

Here’s the goal in question.

https://www.nhl.com/video/embed/stones-goal-cuts-deficit/t-278661586/c-41758803?autostart=false

It deflects slightly off to his right. If he tracks it, he maintains position, maybe leans a bit and makes the initial save at least. Because he didn’t track it, he drops his blocker and shoulder to try to “get something in front of it.” That has the effect of creating the very opening that allowed the goal.







It’s a truism, but you can’t allow goals through the body in the NHL. Make them go around you.

Yes, it’s a tough deflection and it’s by no means a horrible goal, but it was stoppable with proper tracking. And that’s why I don’t like it. On its own, it’s just one of those things. Taken with his season as a whole, however, it’s symptomatic of how his lack of tracking is creating problems for him.