After trading for Phil Kessel in the off-season – as well as adding Nick Bonino, Sergei Plotnikov, Eric Fehr, and Matt Cullen – the assumption coming into this season was the Pittsburgh Penguins would be an offensive juggernaut, but weak defensively after letting go of Paul Martin.

But so far the Penguins have struggled to score at an epic level, currently 27th in the NHL in goals per game at 2.06, and their possession game has cratered as well. Ranked just 23rd in the league in score-adjusted Corsi at 48.2 per cent, the main positive for the team at nearly the quarter mark of the season has been goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury.

Fleury has been slightly above league average in save percentage over the previous five seasons, sporting a .9167 save percentage, while league average has been .9136. This season he’s off to a hot start, stopping 93.1 per cent of the shots he’s faced.

Crazy things can happen with goaltenders in small sample sizes and it’s difficult to separate team effects from goaltending performance over those short periods. It would be easy to credit Fleury with saving the Penguins’ bacon early in the season, but we need to go a bit deeper in our analysis before we can come to that conclusion.

In terms of shot suppression, the Penguins haven’t been helping Fleury out too much. They allow more shots against and shot attempts against per 20 minutes played than league average.

Fewer shot attempts against the Penguins hit the net than league average. Of all the opponents’ shot attempts against the Penguins, 48.1 per cent of them are blocked or miss the net, compared to the league average of 46.3 per cent.

The Penguins do block the ninth-most shots in the league per 20 minutes played, but they allow the fifth-most shot attempts, so it doesn’t seem like they block an inordinate amount of shots. Opponents seem to miss the net more often against the Penguins.

So the next question would be whether teams are missing more shots against the Penguins because they’re being forced to take them from undesirable areas. Let’s look at scoring chances.

Surprisingly, the Penguins allow fewer shot attempts and shots from the slot than average. Most impressively, they allow the seventh-fewest shots on net from the slot, a huge contrast from their shots-against numbers, where they allow the 10th-most in the NHL.

While it looks like the Penguins are quite good at stopping shots on net from the slot, keep the sample size in mind. They are still less than one standard deviation away from the league average.

The big discrepancy between the Penguins’ shot attempts against and shots against are missed shots, not blocked shots, suggesting there’s some good bounces going Pittsburgh’s way early this season.

How this comes back to Fleury though, is that 26.8 per cent of the shots he has faced this season have come from the slot, compared to 30.2 per cent for the average NHL goaltender. It may not seem like a lot, but that difference should have a significant positive impact on Fleury’s save percentage.

Unfortunately for the Penguins, while they do seem to be good at keeping most shot attempts to the outside, because they allow so many anyway, the number of shot attempts against from the slot remains about league average – and it’s unlikely that their opponents missing a higher than average number of those shots from the slot is a skill.

Fleury is definitely stopping pucks at a higher than expected rate, but his performance is a nice combination of good play with a sprinkling of more shots coming from the outside. His save percentage has been boosted by the fact that many good scoring chances are missing the net entirely.