“‘They have to be better in just about every column,’ he said. ‘But they’re not doing horrible in every column, right? They just haven’t found a recipe to win.’”
That was analyst and former New York forward Madison Packer recounting a conversation with Sirens coach Greg Fargo ahead of the team’s pivotal game against the Minnesota Frost on Wednesday. To some, Fargo’s comment may come across as cutting his players some slack with the media. It might even read as frustration, or worse, resignation. To me, it made me think about something I’ve been grappling with about this team for a while now.
Sarah Fillier dragged New York kicking and screaming to an overtime win in the game that followed. After that, I decided to commit those thoughts to writing.
Luck is a touchy subject in sports. It’s the easiest fallback excuse for an inexplicably struggling team. It can be supported with the inexact statistic of PDO. Countered with the abstract idea of ‘making your own luck,’ and suddenly we’re right back where we (just got) started. Whether they’ve been doing themselves any favours or not, calling the Sirens’ season unlucky is reasonable enough. But, the “recipe to win” line made it click exactly how they’ve gone about being unlucky.
The Importance of Timing
I’d liken it to the concept of sequencing in baseball. A home run and three singles will always look the same in the hit column. That said, the timing with which the home run is hit matters significantly. Hitting the home run with the bases loaded as opposed to hitting it prior to the singles creates a difference of three runs, often a game-deciding total. To put that importance of timing in overly specific hockey terms, imagine this scenario. Your reigning Rookie of the Year shoots 1.8% prior to the Olympic break while your team gets .921 goaltending. When pucks finally start going in for her, that save percentage drops all the way to .861. Now, imagine what would happen if that team got the 29.2% shooting percentage and .921 save percentage at the same time.
In fact, let’s lower the bar. Below is a list of how many times this season each PWHL team has both shot at least 10% (excluding empty-netters) and received at least .900 goaltending in the same game. In parentheses is the percentage ratio of those games to the team’s total number of victories.
- Minnesota: 11 (78.6%)
- Ottawa: 8 (61.5%)
- Montréal: 7 (41.1%)
- Boston: 5 (27.8%)
- Vancouver: 4 (44.4%)
- Toronto: 4 (40%)
- Seattle: 3 (42.9%)
- New York: 2 (22.2%)
No team in the PWHL is worse at playing a complete game of hockey than the New York Sirens – and no player is more representative of why that is than Sarah Fillier.
The Fleet manage to eke out a spot in the top half of the list despite their win ratio because Aerin Frankel’s dominance allows them to play in and, more often than not, win low-event hockey games. Ditto for the Victoire and Ann-Renée Desbiens. In that same vein, Fillier is the Sirens’ game-breaker. She’s the one that allows them to leave the arena with standings points even if everything around her falls apart. However, it’s much more difficult to play that role as a skater than a goaltender in the PWHL’s scoring environment, and exponentially so when things just aren’t going your way.
Fillier fired 56 shots on goal in the first half of the season, comfortably placing her top five in the league. Per HockeySkytte’s shot location data, the largest share of those shots were taken from the middle of the ice between the crease and hash marks of the faceoff circles, also known as the slot. This area carries a 15% shooting percentage league-wide, close to doubling the overall average of 8.1%. If you want to score goals, the slot is one of the best places to do it. Fillier consistently found her way to one of the most dangerous spots on the ice, and was subsequently rewarded for doing so with exactly zero goals from there.
Since returning from Milan, Fillier has actually shot the puck less frequently than she did before the break, seeing her per-game average drop from 3.7 to an even 3. Her heat map has remained fairly consistent, with the slot continuing to hold the highest concentration of shots. However, despite minimal change to her overall process, Fillier’s now netted seven goals in eight second-half games, and her shooting percentage has normalized to slightly above league average for the season.
Which brings us back to sequencing.
The Sirens are 1-1-2-7 in their last 11 games, even amidst Fillier’s hot streak. If her scoring was more uniformly distributed throughout the season, or even completely consolidated in the first half to complement their strong goaltending, what would that do for New York’s place in the standings? They only have seven points to lose from any results that it would flip, and up to 17 to gain out of their first 13 contests. Currently five points out of fourth with a game in hand, it’s a tantalizing thought.
A thought is all it is at the end of the day, but this is also a league where the standings can change on a dime. Six games is an eternity in the PWHL, enough time to octuple your season goal total, in Fillier’s case. Inconsistent as they are, part and parcel of being the youngest team in the league, New York’s also clearly demonstrated they’re capable of great things if only they could just put it all together. There’s still plenty of time for the Sirens to pull it off even without diving into hypotheticals.
It might just take a bit of luck along the way.
