It is December and the Philadelphia Flyers are right in the playoff mix. While we were maybe bracing ourselves to watch our favorite hockey team take a tumble through the first couple months of the season and then somehow keep us tuned in, it’s been a fairly enjoyable start to the campaign. But, there are some key little numbers that could mean a playoff berth or looking up draft lottery odds by March.
We all know how volatile a season can be — we’re riding high on some crazy percentage bender from some third-line winger and then suddenly when they stop scoring on every other shot they face, the team’s offense falls off a cliff and so does the team in the standings.
But to prevent that, what are some numbers we should really keep an eye on when it comes to the Flyers? What are some individual stat lines that we need to make sure continue where they are to keep this team afloat and competitive?
Dan Vladar’s high-danger save percentage
Dan Vladar has been the hero we never knew we wanted. Even when he was signed by the Flyers as one of their first moves in free agency on July 1, we all approached it with a wait-and-see attitude. Like, sure, this guy who was Dustin Wolf’s backup in Calgary is suddenly the potential answer to cure all of our goaltending woes.
And, well, he’s been exactly that and more. Suddenly being heralded as the signing of the summer in the entire NHL, Vladar has been a godsend to make the Flyers not embarrass themselves further with some of the worst goaltending the sport of hockey has ever seen. And a lot of Vladar’s performance has been riding on his ability to get saves in the most opportune moments.
Among all netminders in the NHL this season that have been on the ice for at least 300 minutes at 5-on-5, Vladar’s .890 high-danger save percentage (HDSV%) ranks fourth. And, the only true starter above him in the ranking is Washington Capitals’ Logan Thompson and his mind-bending .914 HDSV%. Vladar has simply been one of the best goalies in the league to be able to save those chances from the hard ice and this statistic is usually a massive tell for how well the goalie is playing.
Overall save percentage and in all situations could be really determined a whole lot by the team’s defense in front of him. But when it comes down to the high-danger chances and whether they go in or not, the responsibility is so much more on the actual netminder himself and Vladar is living up to be a true stud in that category.
But, it is something to look out for. Last season, Vladar ranked 60th in the NHL in the same category with a .788 HDSV%; and the year prior he was down to 65th with a .791 HDSV%. There are at least some signs of him being able to do this before, though, with his 2022-23 numbers looking like an .845 HDSV% and him being tied for 27th in the league.
Vladar being at the very tippy top of the NHL in this metric is possibly something that doesn’t hold, but even if he stays among the other true starters in the league, even just in the top 20 or so, it would mean that the Flyers’ goaltending shouldn’t completely fall out from under them. The Flyers have given up the fifth-fewest high-danger shot attempts in the NHL anyways, so the team overall is limiting these opportunities and for right now, Vladar is stopping them at a very good rate.
Trevor Zegras’s 5-on-5 on-ice shooting percentage
Oh look another new addition to this team performing well, let’s hope that it continues.
The main underlying metric that sort of drives whether a player is performing well or not, in my mind, has to be 5-on-5 on-ice shooting percentage. It’s basically just how often the puck is able to go into the back of the net when that player is actually on the ice — simple stuff that probably didn’t need that secondary explanation.
It can mean a player is ice-cold and “looks terrible” just because whoever he’s on the ice with isn’t able to score anything that comes from his stick, or a player is red-hot and everything is going well for him (before he eventually tumbles down to the ground). When it comes to Trevor Zegras, he leads the Flyers with an on-ice shooting percentage of 13.7 percent at 5-on-5. That is a total that should eventually come lower by season’s end, but just how low it goes will determine whether or not some panic starts to settle in.
For reference, those two on-ice shooting percentages listed from Zegras this season is the highest in Flyers history going back all the way to the 2007-08 season when they started keeping track of that stuff. Actually, Flyers this season own four of the top five and eight of the top 18 in that ranking — it might be something for a different article but that doesn’t look too good and we might see a drop in scoring but oh well.
Maybe it’s just because teams overall are shooting less and the goaltending save percentage is dropping because of it (so in correlation, the shooting percentages have gone up over the years) but it should still drop ever so slightly no matter what. It would be a little nuts to continue that way. But just like Vladar’s HDSV%, it depends on how much it drops.
Zegras’s 13.7 on-ice sh% at 5-on-5 ranks 57th in the entire NHL among skaters with at least 100 minutes played. It’s not guaranteed to drop but just last season, that number would have ranked Zegras 17th in the league — basically, a whole lot of players’ percentages should regress back to the mean and Zegras will be along for the ride.
Flyers’ 5-on-5 goals for percentage
Finally, instead of trying to decipher whether or not an individual player can keep up one of the NHL’s best underlying metrics that determines overall success one way or the other, let’s look at a team-wide statistic instead.
It is the most basic analysis in the sport of hockey, but it is generally better when your team is outscoring the opponent at 5-on-5. During the most common game state, when all the players are out there and evenly matched, it is generally good when you can score more goals than the other guys, and not have to depend on your power play to drive your entire team’s success (we know that’s impossible in Philadelphia).
So, with that being said the Flyers are currently scoring 51.04 percent of the goals share at 5-on-5 this season. That’s good for 10th in the NHL and is generally a very good sign that things are going their way. And while the other two earlier metrics could be a little bit more nuanced to determine overall success for this season — those numbers can go down but it could be because of this or that reason, yadda yadda yadda — we know that the Flyers will need to keep outscoring their opponent at 5-on-5 if they want to win any games.
The Flyers’ power play is most likely not going to turn into some powerhouse unit. They are scoring at the 20th-best rate on the man advantage in the league and that is honestly a very positive thing (to not be dead last in that area). But, it is not going to magically turn into something the team can depend on regularly to drive wins, so they have to find success at 5-on-5 instead.
Right now they are, but if they stop doing that and the season-wide number dips below 50 percent, the Flyers most likely are going to be losing a whole lot.
All stats from Natural Stat Trick and Evolving-Hockey
