A Season Preview of a Sort
Microstats and teamwide Key Performance Indicators along with analysis of the offseason changes' potential
The Blue Jackets have been one of the worst teams in the league the past two seasons. Though the 2022-2023 season was sunk largely by horrific and numerous injuries, 2023-2024 felt significantly more reflective of the quality of the players and/or coaching staff.
The Blue Jackets, though they felt like they performed better than their results, struggled to feel like a coherent club. I wrote earlier in the season that their rush offense was immature, pointing to differences in habits between Adam Fantilli and Patrik Laine, but the neutral zone confusion and fractured playstyle permeated across the roster.
This was most noticeable in the drop in performance across large swaths of the season from Patrik Laine, Johnny Gaudreau and Kent Johnson but was, eventually, ameliorated by the emergence of Yegor Chinakhov as a powerful defense breaking force and Cole Sillinger turning into a puck dumping machine.
If I wrote the article now, I’d have a better approach with more salient stats and more diverse video work. Still, the point remains and I believe it the root cause was fundamental flaws in the general collection of talent and the identity espoused by the coaching staff.
While the Blue Jackets may have felt that their record was unlucky, I believe that to be a shallow conclusion and one that betrays some of the fundamental flaws of the roster and coaching. Essentially, Gaudreau’s relative underperformance had more to do with a mismatch of talent and system and Gaudreau’s preferred playstyle was significantly better in terms of generating wins at the NHL level.
Johnny Gaudreau preferred building plays with a series of well executed but otherwise simple passes to stress defenses. The Blue Jackets, especially prior to his arrival, loved home run swing stretch passes and extended weaving carries. Jakub Voracek worked, perhaps better, as a partner for Patrik Laine because of his skill in executing this older school style of play. Same goes for Jack Roslovic.
Their relative inconsistency or hot-and-cold nature was a function of this playstyle and one that shouldn’t be preferred among players who feel like they have the talent to win games consistently. Largely, I believe this is why the Blue Jackets had success under Brad Larsen in 2021-2022. They played the sort of “low-event” and “high risk” game that favors underdogs stealing wins.
Before I go to far in this direction, I believe the short term wins focused coaching from Brad Larsen, whether that was his choice or directive from the Front Office, resulted in his construction of a system that tried to hide their lack of quality centers. Unfortunately, teams with bad centers just aren’t good.
I believe there’s a throughline with this playstyle and poor powerplay performance but that might be something later. In my opinion, the Blue Jackets were facing a potentially larger, but also perhaps related, problem coming into the 2024-2025 season. They didn’t share the puck and their lack of shots from passes meant they were always likely to underperform.
Gathering Storm
Before I get too far into the season preview/key performance indicators for the Blue Jackets this upcoming season. I’ve gleaned most of this knowledge from reading through mostly defunct Hockey-Graphs, which remains the premiere resource for analytics and advancing hockey knowledge via analytics.
In a presentation from CJ Turturo at the 2018 RITSAC, he examined the predictive power of various microstats from AllThreeZones as they relate to positions and existing metrics.
This is the chart that resulted in all of CJ’s excellent work. There’s a lot of information and each chart is broken into positions and corresponding metrics. THe data comes from full seasons of tracked data from the Flyers, Stars and Blue Jackets.
The major conclusion should be that there is some predictive power in AllThreeZones microstats but, and especially with forwards, existing and more basic Relative to team shot, expected goal and goal differentials remain the highest quality metrics.
For forwards, Shot Assists and controlled entries are important. For Defenders controlled Entries Allowed are important.
In the previous 6 years, AllThreeZones has changed and adapted and adjusted metrics. Now, Retrievals are more important and exits are a complementary statistic. Furthermore, teams have overall improved their process which has challenged the validity of previously very valuable metrics (CF% having better predictivity for GF% than xGF%, perhaps because of league wide adaptation to the metric).
So lets take a moment and remember that this is old data but data still worth considering.
Offensive Metrics
I was looking through data and cultivating information for this breakdown prior to the death of Johnny Gaudreau. The problem, at least in my estimation, will only be further enhanced by his loss.
The first metric to examine in understanding this issue is Shot Assists. Ryan Stimson did a lot of the early work in examining the importance of passing in winning hockey games and I was reminded of the quality of his work while rereading Tape-to-Space this past summer.
In short, if you want to know how many points a forward will score over the remainder of the season, you’re much better off using their Primary Shot Contributions than Primary Points. Points can be deceiving. Shot Contributions are more exact.
What we learn when we break down PSC/60 into its two components – Shots/60 and Shot Assists/60 – is that a player’s ability to set up others has a much stronger influence over the remaining number of primary points they will score than their own shooting does.
The Blue Jackets, for better or worse, prioritized skating and pace over passing. They fractured their players capacity to build dangerous possession as an attempt to establish a forechecking game built off of the systems of Mike Babcock. The result was a solid bottom five performance in shot assists/60. There’s certainly an issue with the size of the tracked sample but from Ryan Stimson’s words above Shot Contributions, and specifically Shot Assists, are predictive much earlier than raw points or other metrics of performance.
The Blue Jackets were also one of the most permissive clubs at allowing passes that lead to shots. It should not be considered a coincidence that Florida, Carolina, New York, Avalanche, Winnipeg and Edmonton (at least offensively) are among the top teams in each category.
They aren’t necessarily good because they pass before shooting and prevent other teams from passing before shooting but there is certainly some signal. The Blue Jackets should not have been suprised that they underperformed.
Coming into the season, the Blue Jackets trimmed the roster and set it up for further construction. Unfortunately, in losing Johnny Gaudreau, Alexandre Texier, Patrik Laine and Jack Roslovic they have lost each of their top Shot Assisters. Adam Fantilli and Kent Johnson are the only remaining above-average NHLers, at least among the sample, at passing the puck prior to shots.
The Blue Jackets took a roster comprised of too many shoot first players (Boone Jenner, Patrik Laine, Cole Sillinger, Kirill Marchenko, Yegor Chinakhov, Adam Fantilli, Emil Bemstrom) and then pruned the best passers of the bunch.
Texier perhaps stands at odds with some of the others. He’s not a particularly proficient passer but did develop special chemistry with Fantilli early in the season and took advantage of low competition minutes as the primary creator with Kuraly and Olivier (and offensive risk taker with Sillinger-Marchenko). His performance was still good but this betrays how poor he was defensively.
This isn’t an end-all-be-all metric, as there are different categories of dangerous chances and I haven’t done any further study to determine which is most predictive of future goal scoring. Marchenko stood out at passes leading to chances and Fantilli and Kent Johnson both stood out again at completing high danger passes.
From a defensive perspective, the Blue Jackets also trimmed Adam Boqvist, the only above average defenseman on the roster at generating Shot Assists.
Defensive Metrics
Speaking of defensemen, the Blue Jackets were also quite poor at another significant metric and one that degraded their capacity to start offense.
According to Alex Novet, whose presentation is linked above, “About a quarter of goals come after failed exits and over 40% of all goals come from “poor” exits.”
The Blue Jackets were the worst team in the league, in the sample, at failing to exit the zone doing so on 28% of the attempts. In this case, these are pucks that are instant turnovers before the redline or ones that fail to leave the zone and end in opposition possession entirely.
They were also among the league worst in botching retrievals. Retrievals are more complicated and difficult to understand but should generally be understood as a defenseman’s approach to a loose puck, after a dump-in or shot on net. A botched retrieval, then, is one that results in an immediate opposition possession.
Good teams like Carolina, Nashville, New York, Colorado, Vegas, Florida and Dallas once again take up generally prominent positions on the teamwide metric.
As far as offseason moves go, moving on from Boqvist looks much better but the rest of the higher minute higher leverage defensemen remain on the team. Werenski shows out very poorly as a result of a quite horrific performance in the overweighted November sample and though his 2024 sample was quite good he’ll have to prove that this was indeed an artefact of his extended injury absence.
From there, Provorov and Gudbranson were the biggest culprits, especially when factoring in their lack of quality play in other transition metrics, and David Jiricek still has plenty to go in terms of efficiency. Severson struggled to find an impact and Jake Bean was an overall low-leverage puck mover in general.
Until the Blue Jackets can find a way to move on from solid but turnover prone veterans in Erik Gudbranson and Ivan Provorov, and especially so if Severson and Werenski don’t reclaim their form, they may struggle in all downstream metrics (like quality play after entries). That isn’t the say they should immediately move Gudbranson or Provorov but whatever makes a coach or GM feel they add to a roster must be filled elsewhere.
Similarly, the Blue Jackets were also poor entry defenders. If converting rush offense into chances is important then preventing those same chances must also be beneficial from the other perspective.
Though Andrew Peeke escaped a cancerous sample of his puck moving he did not fare so well in terms of etnry defense. I don’t necessarily believe either are accurate representations of his true skillset, he’s a much worse puck mover than rush defender, moving on from his minutes is only likely to be a good thing.
Adam Boqvist and David Jiricek looked excellent in very small target samples but otherwise Severson and Jake Bean were the best entry defenders. There isn’t much to conclude here from a roster change perspective. The Blue Jackets were simply poor at defending the blue line across the board.
From offseason transactions, the Blue Jackets have made few significant changes to the defensive pool and improvement will therefore come from within.
The Turning Tide
The general tenor of the offseason, especially after hiring Don Waddell, was that the Blue Jackets believed, prior to Gaudreau’s death, that they weren’t too far off. While sequencing and coaching decisions certainly had an effect and while the AllThreeZones sample was weighted toward a period of quite poor performance in October and November, the Blue Jackets certainly looked further away than their underwhelming xGF% may have indicated.
Perhaps that was madate from ownership or perhaps it’s just what hockey executives say to the press to continue to drive gate receipts. If not, you’d have to believe that the Blue Jackets are counting on Dean Evason to make a major change both on and off the ice.
The Coach Factor
Up to this point in training camp, there’s plenty of reason to believe he will have that effect. While the Blue Jackets may not be “close” anymore, they are playing their long term aspirations close to their chest.
In terms of the previously examined metrics and along with the review of Dean Evason’s systems, I believe there’s room for optimism even if we’re required to look past this season.
Where the Blue Jackets previously demanded pace through the neutral zone, Evason’s Minnesota Wild often sought to link and create passing plays after entry. He demands active neutral zone killing and his in-zone defense is streamlined.
The Blue Jacket media coverage has been hyperfixated on his team having the Foligno- Eriksson-Ek- Greenway line who bullied the Blue Jackets into making their team worse late in 2021-22. They believe that Evason only wants to play heavy and combative hockey. The new Blue Jackets coach has been graceful in emphasizing his desire for the team to score goals while being careful not to demean the big players that are currently on the roster. He emphasizes aggressive pressure play and not necessarily chasing hits and crosschecking at the netfront. Evason’s best defender was Jared Spurgeon.
It will be important to pay attention to the systems that Evason instills. I’ve made some observations and pulled some clips from scrimmages and preseason games but this will be a project that likely extends into the beginning of the regular season as the team has time to gel.
Depending on systems implemented, the Blue Jackets have reason to expect internal improvement across many of the metrics especially in regard to blue line play on both sides of the puck. If Don Waddell is stealing knowledge from Carolina, there should also be strict emphasis on eliminating botched retrievals and failed exits as well.
Internal Regression
While the overall changes to the roster haven’t been outwardly significant, there’s reason to believe that some of the players may return to previously established standards.
The biggest contributors, in this regard, would be Zach Werenski and Damon Severson. Werenski has been, at times, a top puck mover in the sport. He hasn’t quite cleared the bar established recently by Cale Makar, Adam Fox and Quinn Hughes but his Retrieval and Exit Success rates has been near the tops of the league.
Offensively, Werenski had his by far most productive season (including being the best 5v5 offensive defenseman in the league by Evolving Hockeys Offensive GAR submodel). From a microstats perspective, Werenski was poor. Perhaps this should tell us that there was an issue with the sample but perhaps its also sign of the potential unsustainability of Werenski’s 2023-24 performance.
Werenski has always been shot focused and there’s no reason for him to change that playstyle completely but a renewed focus on generating shot assists should take the place of his high danger focused approach when he shared ice with Johnny Gaudreau.
Severson, on the other hand, has never been a particularly prolific puck mover. He has been, and was early in the season, a dominant neutral zone defender and a high profile shot-assister from the blue line.
If these two high minute defensemen return to their previous heights, it should have a massive effect on the team’s overall performance. Dean Evason loves active defensemen and asks them to find middle ice. Werenski did so under Larsen but Vincent relegated his defensemen to deep wall territory akin. With a renewed middle focus approach, there’s reason to believe it could happen.
In terms of rush offense, Chinakhov and Marchenko’s performance from last season should only be built on. Chinakhov, in particular, has all the makings of an excellent rush driver.
The biggest contributor, especially in the shadow of Gaudreau, could be Kent Johnson. Johnson’s rookie season showed a near unprecedented D+2 rush quality approach that was eschewed in favor of dumping the puck.
A return to this game won’t replace the departed Gaudreau and Roslovic but it would bode well for Johnson’s increased in-zone and overall offensive (shot assists especially) metrics.
Similarly, there’s reason to be optimistic for Adam Fantilli’s growth. He was great at creating transition volume but still has plenty of work to do to turn that into quality. It’s too soon to know whether that will come this season or whether his leap will come later.
External Growth
While the analytics and counting stats don’t suggest massive growth from the Blue Jackets’ offseason additions, there’s an undercurrent of Don Waddell’s priorities. Each of Sean Monahan, James van Riemsdyk, Jack Johnson and Jordan Harris have in common: shot assists.
The above breakdown is more comprehensive. The overall conclusion is that Sean Monahan should not be considered a 1C but did perform well in different roles on Montreal and Winnipeg. In each he would technically be considered a middle six center. In Montreal he played with forechecking wingers and produced on the powerplay. In Winnipeg on an offensive oriented middle six line and was much better at 5v5.
In both situations he was above average at generating shot assists/60. While it is important to evaluate him holistically on the larger metrics it’s important to note that he is capable of sharing the puck.
While I don’t have film to offer for James van Riemsdyk or the other additions because ESPN has removed the 2023-24 archive, his microstats were certainly sterling. Like Monahan he played on a sheltered and insulated role on an excellent Boston team but his prioritization of passing the puck, working well in the defensive zone and in linking plays after entries makes him a round peg in the CBJ roster round hole fit.
I wouldnt’ expect high performance to continue but he’ll be bringing a refreshing skillset. Both he and Monahan grade out quite well on my very rough and very informal “insulator” index.
This index isn’t fully complete but it includes players like Scott Hartnell (Wennberg, Dano), Jake Voracek(Laine, Sillinger), Jamie Benn (WyJo, Stankoven), Joe Pavelski (Hintz, Robertson) and Gustav Nyquist (also Sillinger) who have been successful playing next to very young players. The loose criteria:
Was once Very Good
Shot Assists > Shots
Low Transition Volume, High Relative Quality
Low Relative Turnovers (where Laine, Texier, Gudbranson, Provorov have failed)
Active in Retrieving Pucks and Starting Transition
Puck Acquisition and Puck Protection to stall for Timing
There’s more to be said but Monahan and JVR should each play a style that lets young players take chances and learn NHL hockey without being lost or drowned in mistakes. Essentially, their on-ice style increases high quality reps from young players without eclipsing them.
It’s just an idea and one that I’d certainly like to rigorously examine later.
Both Jordan Harris and Jack Johnson prioritize shot assists over shooting from the point. While neither looks like a perfect high profile fit, Harris’ entry defense weakness and Johnson’s being turnover prone, both should bring a new flavor.
Though this season might not be a substantial improvement, Don Waddell has shown through each of his additions that he is slowly bringing new priorities to the veterans on the roster. Though Evason has chafed against the need for a wholesale “culture change” in the room, Waddell has already started to bring in veterans who might bring an on-ice style difference.
These changes could have significant impact on the organization even if they aren’t realized immediately.
Next Wave
Denton Mateychuk and Gavin Brindley look like they are pencilled in for AHL seasoning as a Waddell mandate. Largely, that’s probably great for their development. What I’d like to point out, however, is how well their skillsets match with Waddell’s changing tide.
Gavin Brindley is fiery and pacey. His biggest skillsets won’t leap out in some of this data but notice that one of his best skills involves creating advantages for his teammates and especially in shot assists/60. Similarly, he’s an aggressive and avid backchecker.
Denton Mateychuk isn’t exactly similar but also has aligned strenghts. He’s a fantastic passer in all zones and is a preeminent shot assister. Where he’ll be a natural complement with Gavin Brindley, potentially, is in his aggressive transition defense. Calling the way Mateychuk plays “Entry Defense” doesn’t quite do his proactiveness justice.
While Lindstrom and Elick may not push for the roster in 2025-26 with Mateychuk and Brindley, they are also well positioned to continue the Blue Jackets’ transition into a more pass-oriented* and aggressive neutral zone defending team.
Lindstrom is certainly shoot first but has shown a capacity to link plays and feed teammates in dangerous situations. In reviewing his offensive breakdown, he’s actually an excellent distributor in in-zone situations stemming from excellent net front and wall playmaking ideas. Off the rush, though he should certainly offer a solid bet on turning entry volume into entry quality, he almost exclusively shoots.
Elick doesn’t create a lot of offense by passing, flashed some puck moving ideas in transition and is certainly aggressive in breaking up passes and preventing transition offense.
All this to say, the playstyle changes beging this season by planting seeds and may undergo substantial positive changes if the Blue Jackets’ young prospects enter an environment that their skillsets should enhance.
TL;DR
Don Waddell’s off-season changes haven’t necessarily primed the Blue Jackets for immediate success. However, his prioritization of a coach that encourages puck sharing and aggressive neutral zone defending along with his offseason additions should be sowing seeds for future success.
The future of the NHL is in passing and preventing passing.
The Key Performance Indicators for the Blue Jackets in 2024-25 should be: Shot Assists/60, Entries Leading to Chances/60, Entry Denial%, Entries Leading to Chances Allowed/60, Failed Exit% and Successful Retrieval%.
Improvement on the powerplay will be necessary but that’s a breakdown for another time.