Anatomy of a Rebuild part 2

The 2023-24 NHL season is drawing closer to a close and the Pittsburgh Penguins only have 11 games left, their final game will be on April 17. As it stands now they are 7th in the Metropolitan Division and 13th in the Eastern Conference. They are not completely out of the running yet, there are basically eight teams competing for three spots: the third seed in the Metro as well as the two Wild Card spots. The Pens are currently 10 points behind the Philadelphia Flyers for 3rd in the division and 9 points behind the Washington Capitals for the final Wild Card. What they have going for them is that two of their games are against the Columbus Blue Jackets who are dead last in the East and they have games against the New Jersey Devils, Washington Capitals, Tampa Bay Lightning, Detroit Red Wings, and New York Islanders who are the other teams vying for these positions so a win over them would mean fewer points to catch up on their opponents.

However, as it stands their chances of making the playoffs are incredibly slim. The Pens have 72 points in 71 game played giving them a 50.7 P% and having won only 31 leaves them with a 43.7 W%. They are on the verge of missing the playoffs for a second year in a row and this is the worst they have done since the final year of Mario Lemieux’s career. They currently 19 points behind where they were when they missed the playoffs last year which was the worst full season performance in the past 16 years. Their current 72 points is tied with the lowest they have been in the past 18 years, the one they are tied with being the 48-game lockout-shortened season. So all signs point to them missing the playoffs again this year and starting a rebuild.

So in preparation for a rebuild I wanted to take a look back at our past rebuilds to get an idea of how long we can expect it to take and what kind of impact the draft has on their comeback. They are referring to the current situation as a retooling rather than tearing it all down and starting fresh, so it may not take as long as a full rebuild. Last time we took a look back at the Lemieux era, the years of my youth and introduction to hockey as they built back up from nothing to win back-to-back Stanley Cups and a decade of playoff appearances through the ’90s. This time we are looking at the dark years of the X Generation which led to the start of the current era.

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Anatomy of a Rebuild part 1

The Pittsburgh Penguins have not won a playoff series since 2018 when they got bumped in the second round and are on the verge of missing the playoffs for the second year in a row. They are on pace to have the worst full season record since Sidney Crosby’s rookie year in 2005-06 and this year and last are the first times they have been under .500 since then. They have 14 games remaining and are 22 points shy of last year’s total, so unless they go on a tear and end the season nearly undefeated they will be even worse than they were when the missed the playoffs last season.

The Pens seem intent on keeping head coach Mike Sullivan despite his failures, general manager Kyle Dubas has reiterated multiple times that he thinks Sully is one of the best coaches in the league. However, we saw in an article after Ron Hextall was fired that there was a lot of strife between the coach and the front office and that when there were disagreements he would go over their heads and get the owners to back him, so we can’t say for certain if Dubas even has the ability to fire the coaches or if his hands are tied by Fenway Sports Group just as badly as the former GM was. The funny thing is that the last coach they fired, Mike Johnston, was let go because they were barely over .500 with 15 wins in the first 28 games when he got fired and 43 wins and a 1st round exit in the full season prior to that. Then there was Dan Bylsma who was fired after finishing 1st in the division and losing in the 2nd round. Despite finishing first in the conference and making it to the conference finals the year prior it was considered an unacceptable failure. Yet Sullivan loses in the 1st round for four straight years before finishing under .500 and missing the playoffs altogether and he somehow manages to stick around and be unjustly touted as one of the best coaches.

Like it or not, the Penguins find themselves in a rebuild, although I believe they are branding it a retooling because they aren’t looking to tear everything down and start from scratch. I have lived my whole life in the Pittsburgh area and grew up in the ’80s so I have got to experience two different occasions in which the team went from bottom of the barrel to Stanley Cup champions, so I am well prepared to have them struggle for a few years until they can turn things around again. I wanted to take a look back at our past rebuilds, see how long it took, what our drafting looked like in the intervening years, and which players were homegrown talent by the time they did make it back into the playoff race.

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Pittsburgh Penguins Goals versus Expectations

My previous two posts were looking at the difference in assists from passes and assists from shots in order to determine if players were more of a sniper or a playmaker. This time I wanted to focus on goals and expected goals to compare which players are underperforming and which exceed expectations. These graphs come from the same data I used for the past two posts, which is 5-on-5 data from David Johnson’s Puckalytics from the past three seasons 2021-22 through 2023-24. The data was up to date through March 12, so there have been 4 additional Pittsburgh Penguins games since then which means it is missing out on a few goals.

I calculated league averages over the three season span as well as the players who are currently under contract with the Pens as well as those who departed the team since Ron Hextall was fired, so we can compare the current roster to those which Kyle Dubas let go. We are looking at individual goals per 60 compared to expected goals per 60, with a delta goals per 60 calculated as the difference between the values. Expected goals, despite being presented in the same manner as actual goals, is actually just a puck possession metric that combined shot attempts with shot quality to estimate what the average player would have scored if they took the same amount of shots. I also used the data to calculate Fenwick shot percent and expected Fenwick shot percent to get a delta value difference between those numbers as well. Fenwick shot percent is goals divided by unblocked shot attempts, which I prefer because it takes into account a player’s ability to hit the net.

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Passer or Shooter? Pittsburgh Penguins Forwards

The other day I worked on a post on the Pittsburgh Penguins D, so today I am going to continue the effort by going over the data for the forwards. I have 5-on-5 data from the past three seasons 2021-22 through 2023-24 courtesy of David Johnson who writes about analytics on HockeyAnalysis and provides a database of statistics at Puckalytics. So what we are looking at again today is the breakdown of assists from passes (A_P) and assists from shots (A_S). This allows us to get a look at the data to determine who are better playmakers and which are more snipers.

So I made a handful of graphs to visualize the data, combining goals with assists from shots to give us points from shots (P_S) and using assists from passes as is for points from passes (P_P) and comparing those with the NHL league average for their position. I have the points as both a percentage of total points and as a points per 60 rate in order to evaluate who is better at distributing pucks and who tends to shoot it on net themselves. I also did the same for primary points, that is goals plus first assists, because these are the situations in which a player directly contributes to scoring. And since we are evaluating shooting I also included a graph of shots on goal compared to unblocked shot attempts. We have data for players who are currently on the Pens roster as well as an assortment of players who have left the team after Ron Hextall was fired and Kyle Dubas took over as the new General Manager.

Passer or Shooter? Pittsburgh Penguins D

David Johnson, the man behind my old favourite site HockeyAnalysis which was my introduction to the analytics community over a decade ago, has recently re-entered the public sphere after several years working for the Calgary Flames and now has a new site Puckalytics for tracking NHL fancystats. He has the data from the NHL Edge website in a more accessible database format as well the ability to look at forward lines and D pairs and even PP and PK units. But what I wanted to take a look at today is something I have not seen anywhere else, the player data has assists broken down as assists from passes and assists from shots. We can use that data to try to determine if a player is more of a playmaker or a sniper. Does the player get most of their points from passing or from shooting the puck? Are they better or worse than the league average?

So what I did was take the data and put together a few graphs so that we can evaluate the Pittsburgh Penguins performance. The data I am using is 5-on-5 data from the past three seasons 2021-22 through 2023-24. I am looking at the current roster, some of whom haven’t played in the NHL this year since they have been down in the AHL, as well as any players who have left the team since after Ron Hextall was fired and Kyle Dubas came in as the new General Manager. We are looking at points from shots, that is both goals and assists that came as a result of a shot that player took, compared against points from passes, which are assists that were not after a shot and as such means the player passed the puck. I looked at these numbers both as a percentage of total points and calculated as a per 60 rate and compared them to the NHL league average for their position. I also looked at both overall points and primary points to get an idea of what the player looks like when making a direct contribution to the goal scored. Lastly I included a look at shots on goal compared to unblocked shot attempts so that we can see how effective the shooters actually are.