The discrepancy in the Flyers’ goaltending at home vs. on the road is staggering

With recent shellackings in San Jose and Los Angeles still front of mind, the fact that your Philadelphia Flyers are a significantly, drastically worse team on the road than they are at home is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Entering tonight’s games, the Flyers sit eighth in the NHL in points percentage, having collected 61.3 percent of all possible points available. But if you just isolate for games at home, the Flyers have collected a ridiculous 78.9 percent of all points available — the best of any team in the NHL. You would think that a team that protects its house like that would be sailing along a bit more smoothly than this team is, but that’s not going to be the case when you are 22nd in the league in points percentage on the road, at 45.2 percent, like the Flyers currently are. (Home/road splits here courtesy of nhl dot com.)

Now, of course, “being better at home than on the road” does not make the Flyers special — it is one of the most basic truisms in all of sports that teams are generally better at home than they are elsewhere. This year, for example, NHL teams collect 60.9 percent of available points at home, compared to 51.1 percent on the road. And this split tends to be seen in pretty much every way — even-strength play-driving metrics tend to favor the home team (as of this writing, 52.2 percent of all unadjusted even-strength Expected Goals this season have been collected by home teams), as do power play opportunities, save percentages, and most other numbers you can dig up. Whatever the reasons are — structural, mental, emotional, physical — teams are just better at stuff at home.

But the Flyers seem to be a lot better at stuff at home than they are on the road this year. And that is worth paying close attention to for a team that, if it makes the playoffs, is most likely not going to have home ice in the first round unless it can manage to beat out at least three out of Washington, Pittsburgh, Carolina, or the Islanders in the final standings.

Yet even though the Flyers are clearly playing better at home than on the road, the single biggest driver of the discrepancy between the team’s home performance and its road performance might just be a rather simple one: sometimes you just need a friggin’ save. And the Flyers seem to get that save a lot at home, and they don’t really seem to on the road.

Below is each team in the NHL’s performance in terms of Expected Goals Allowed** vs. Actual Goals Allowed in its games through Tuesday, separated out by home and away. (Data includes all game situations except overtime and when either team has an empty net. The below table is sortable on some devices.)

You can see there that, at home, only one team (Dallas) has saved more goals above expectation than the Flyers have this year. And if you sort by the rightmost column, you can also see that, on the road, only one team (Los Angeles) has allowed more goals above expectation than the Flyers have this year.

And if we really want to hammer the point home, we can look at straight-up save percentage, which tells us essentially an identical story. At home, only Dallas has a better save percentage than the Flyers; on the road, only Florida has a worse one. The gap between the Flyers’ home and road numbers is far and away the biggest in the league.

This is not to let the team’s skaters off the hook for their play in road games (or to take away from their play in home games), or suggest that goaltending is the team’s only problem on the road, or anything of the sort. Save percentage and xG models are not perfect barometers, and even if they were, a lot of things go into the scoring (or allowing) of a goal. The Flyers should be looking at all possible problems when it comes to their play on the road, and we could probably spend more words here talking about those too if we wanted to. But the differences in goaltending go so far beyond “teams are better at home” that it’s hard not to single them out.

So, for good measure, let’s single them out a bit more. (Same conditions as above — regulation only, no empty-net situations included.)

Brian Elliott has pretty much been the same goalie at home and on the road this year — slightly “below expectation” in both. But it’s Carter Hart whose splits here are so drastic they’re almost impossible to miss.

Hart has finished each of the 14 home games that he’s started this year, and in those games the Flyers have just one regulation loss (and two shootout losses). He has allowed more than one goal in only five of those 14 games, and more than two goals in only three of them (and of those three, one was the “home” game in Prague). When Carter Hart starts at home, good things tend to happen to the Flyers.

In his 13 road appearances, good things have not tended to happen. Of the 10 starts Hart has made on the road (he’s also relieved Elliott three times, all in eventual losses), Hart has been pulled three times. He hasn’t started and finished a game on the road without allowing at least two goals, and the Flyers haven’t won a road game in regulation this year that he has appeared in (both of his road wins were shootout victories).

Hart is clearly a talented goaltender, and there’s absolutely a degree to which it’s understandable that a 21-year old who doesn’t have a ton of experience with the rigors of an NHL schedule may struggle a bit away from home. And again, we would probably have to do more work to isolate how much of this is on the goalie himself and how much is on the guys in front of him.

And also, for the record: we are talking about two different not-even-15-game-samples both at home and on the road. Goaltending is volatile, and it can both be true that Hart is genuinely playing better at home than he is on the road and that we can probably expect both the excellent home numbers and the not-so-good road numbers to fall a bit closer to expectation in the second half of the season.

But at the end of the day, if you want to figure out how to make the Flyers a better road team, it probably starts with their franchise goaltender.

Data in this piece courtesy of Moneypuck.com unless noted otherwise.

** A brief refresher: “Expected Goals” are the number of goals that one would expect a team to score during the game based on the volume and quality of the shots they take and allow. Each shot has an Expected Goal (xG) value based on the location it was shot from, what type of shot it was, whether it was a rebound, and several other factors. So, in other words, looking at the first table in our post here, based on the kinds of shots the Flyers have allowed defensively this year in all of their home games, you would “expect” them to have allowed approximately 46.67 goals — in other words, somewhere around 46 or 47 goals. Instead, they have allowed 33. For a further explanation on the statistic in general, click here. For more specifics on this particular Expected Goals model (there are a few out there), click here.