On Shutouts, Confidence, and Women's Tennis

It always bothers me just a little bit to find out that I’m enormously mainstream.

And I voted that we’ll have a SHO by end of November and that they are indeed important. I think they would build confidence, as Ben suggested. Or planted in my brain. Even though all the players last year said they weren’t. I don’t believe them in this case.

And never take any of Homer’s assurances to the bank :-). I do hope he gets well soon, though.

Shutouts are great for a goalie’s confidence, and confidence is one of the most underrated factors in hockey. When your goalie is confident, your team is confident, and when your team is confident, good things tend to happen. Shutouts are not critically important, especially for a veteran team, but shutouts are certainly not NOT important.

But all three goalies had new helmets last year!

How much more confident could they be?

In 2008, Ana Ivanovic won a semifinal match at the French Open to clinch the #1 ranking. Nobody had held the #1 ranking without a Grand Slam title, yet the pressure and scrutiny this caused did not seem to affect her, as she went out and won the finals two days later.

Nor did getting that monkey off her back seem to help her, as in her next Grand Slam she had to fight off two match points in the second round and lost to the world’s #133 in the third round — and soon lost the top ranking as well.

Since that time, the top ranking has changed hands quite frequently. Let’s take a look at whether people with Grand Slam trophies held it for more weeks than those without:

With: 9, 3, 4, 11, 2, 49, 1; average = 11; median = 4
Without: 1, 17, 25, 1, 18, 30-and-counting; average = 15++; median = 17.5

People who have never won a Grand Slam have retained the top position significantly longer than people who have. To me, it doesn’t look like the issue is one of pressure related to past accomplishments; it looks to me like there’s a deep field with no clear leader, which makes it possible to ascend to the top spot by virtue of a few deep-but-trophyless-runs and makes it equally possible to lose the top spot a few weeks later.

Similarly, I find it hard to believe that Bob needed to get a shutout in November or December for the Flyers to score a goal in game 1 against Buffalo instead of losing 1-0. I find it hard to believe that his lack of shutouts are what made the penalty killers play comically badly in front of him in the second game.

And if those two things hadn’t happened, if after four periods the team had a 1-0 series lead and he had a 1.5 GAA, I don’t think he would’ve been demoted to third string and I don’t think we’d be having this conversation.

Hi Ben!

I feel this is more of a conditional thing; if our beat writers can learn not to say the S word during a game, they’ll get one. The only good thing about Chuck leaving our beat is that he won’t be the first to start jinxing them. So I went with option 4 up there, let’s not get overconfident and stop caring about it, so then a shutout can just happen spontaneously at some point without everybody agonizing over it.