CBJ 2023-24 Microstats Review
If you’ve followed along and watch the Blue Jackets throughout this past season, you already know that they weren’t very good. There isn’t much there I truly need to tell you.
Some of the analytical data is within the quite long-winded, and certainly “ranty”, breakdown above but I’ll show it here so that everything is all in one place.
The Blue Jackets remained a bottom producing team (ranked 26th in GF at 5v5). Their 5v5 goals against (30th), powerplay (30th) and penalty kill (27th) were all significant weaknesses. Pretty much everything was bad, as it should be. This is a rebuilding club according to everyone except the front office.
As far as the more advanced analytics say the improvement looks a bit better. This team is now close, if slightly improved, from Brad Larsen’s first season as Blue Jackets Head Coach. In terms of xGF (5v5, score and venue adjusted, according to EvolvingHockey.com) the Blue Jackets ranked 17th, in terms of xGA they ranked 31st.
For possession metrics, the Blue Jackets ranked 13th in CF (once again at 5v5 score and venue adjusted) and 31st in CA.
In 2022-23, the Blue Jackets ranked 26th in xGF, 31st in xGA, 25th in CF, 31st in CA.
The Blue Jackets made marginal improvements across the board. The offense had a more appreciable improvement. While their defense didn’t improve in rank it did improve in overall quality. The Blue Jackets went from a -116 goal differential to a -63 goal differential.
No matter which way you slice it, they finished the worst team in the Eastern Conference.
Here’s a very visually noisy overview from HockeyViz. I include it here because I think it’s important to represent that the season wasn’t necessarily a static thing. There were moments of good play (a very specific period I will wrote more on in the future) and moments of both good and bad goaltending and/or finishing.
The start of the season was horrendous as was the post-TDL injury + playing against good teams stretch.
Hand-Tracked Microstats
These microstats are all from hand-tracked data from Corey Sznajder. For a list of definitions, consult his glossary here!
The benefit of reviewing the season with these stats is that they describe a little more of the “whys” behind the underlying results. Essentially, they are a step closer to the “eye test” simply by quantifying certain events. Corey Sznajder chooses reliable stats that are partially informed by his former colleague, Eric Tulsky, who both worked together in early public analytics and again in the Carolina Front Office.
The problem with using these stats is that they can suffer from sample size issues, especially in the case of the Blue Jackets who had most of their games tracked in November.
List of Tracked Games:
10/12 vs Philadelphia
11/6 vs Florida
11/9 vs Dallas
11/12 vs New York Rangers
11/14 vs Pittsburgh
11/18 vs Washington
11/19 vs Philadelphia
11/26 vs Carolina
12/1 vs Ottawa
The above games are the data on display in the below vizzes. The below games listed were tracked and are available in the end-of-season totals spreadsheet but aren’t taken into account.
1/2 vs Boston
1/9 vs Winnipeg
1/13 vs Seattle
1/25 vs Calgary
3/7 vs Edmonton
3/30 vs Pittsburgh
4/13 vs Nashville
As we can see above, the tracked games represent some of the worst of the Blue Jackets’ 5v5 play and not much of their brief competitive period. As such, the data will paint an unfavorable picture but not one that wasn’t earned through their poor start.
Similarly, these stats do not adjust for competition, usage or teammates, so certain stats are better than others considering teammates. No single stat is going to describe the reason for success or failure but they can give us an idea of style and potentially inform specific areas of the game that improvement will be necessary.
Shot Creation by Style
The Blue Jackets generated nearly all of their shots off the rush. In terms of shooting off of the forecheck and cycle, they were a bottom three team worse than Chicago and San Jose and only better than Buffalo and Ottawa.
You could draw the conclusion that these teams are simply young rush teams who aren’t built for the playoffs but that may obscure the attempted changes made through the season. Each of these teams came with a focus to convert to a more conservative, defense focused system that actively tried to move away from exclusively rush chances.
Chance Creation For and Against
The same grouping of teams appears here, only this time joined in the offensive chance generation doldrums by San Jose, Chicago, the New York Islanders and Washington Capitals.
Theoretically, these teams did indeed suppress chances against and may be categorized as “good defense” but I would recommend against that because of the obscene tradeoff for quality offense.
Perhaps each of these “underperforming” teams will then conclude that they only need to be better than the Capitals and the Islanders and are therefore close to the playoffs but I would hope that a thinking evaluator would see their performance down the stretch and in the playoffs and realize that this isn’t the style you want to be.
As a young team, I’d much rather be in Montreal’s or New Jersey’s position.
Either way, not the point of this breakdown. The Blue Jackets shot often off of the rush but had few quality chances. Why?
Rush Offense Efficiency
Well, the Blue Jackets (along with Ottawa, Buffalo, Islanders and Capitals) are all bad at turning possession entries into scoring chances. Their efficiency was not good.
So while the Blue Jackets may have stood out relative to the league in terms of rush shooting they were bottom five in turning those rush shots into chances.
Why again?
Shots and Passes
Well, all of the same team show up once again. Each of these teams struggles to pass to their teammates for shots. Something about each of them forced solo play and on-stick shooting attempts rather than off-pass shooting.
High Danger Passes For and Against
Furthermore, the Blue Jackets are among the worst in high-danger opportunities. Simply put, they did not prioritize or were not capable of chaining together a sequence of events that resulted in passing to high danger areas.
Putting this all together paints the picture of a team that likes to shoot off the rush, and is talented at finishing in that regard, but one that isn’t close at doing everything else that results in quality offense.
The Blue Jackets are great at finishing on low-value shots but struggle to upgrade those shots into higher-value shots via rush efficiency or off forecheck/cycle creation. They do a hard thing well but they don’t do the important things that make winning easier. That feels like a good representation of the team Jarmo Kekelainen has been building.
Forechecking Metrics
I believe forechecking is technically an aspect of defense and/or transition, but I’ll include it here since so much of the previous offensive data has focused on lack of forecheck/cycle and rush data.
Really, it’s all very interconnected.
From here, we can see that the Blue Jackets were among the worst forechecking teams in the league. They were just below-average in terms of recovering dump-ins but in terms of pressuring the puck carriers and disrupting breakouts they were among the worst.
The problem comes from their lack of ability to slow or disrupt opposition breakouts. I do believe that the tracked sample has something to do with this but I wouldn’t expect dramatic improvements in forechecking over the course of the season.
Neutral Zone Defending
Neutral zone defending is an incredibly important aspect of defending as a whole. It was the focus of my work last off-season in determining what head coaches looked for from a defense pair perspective.
The Blue Jackets were incredibly passive and bad last season and this season there is some improvement. The neutral zone structure improved, evidenced by opposing teams entering the zone less frequently, but not it a way that allowed them to kill entries which is more important from a downstream offense perspective.
A couple of things are at play here. First, the Blue Jackets could be a poor neutral zone defending team. Their Zone Entries Against per 60 could be so low simply because opposing teams spent so much time in the offensive zone that they didn’t need to re-enter very often. That’s probably not a large effect but it could bump them from a top 10 team to one near average.
Secondly, the previous forechecking metrics could also be at play. The Blue Jackets didn’t slow down opposition forechecks very much and therefore defended the neutral zone from a deficit. As a result, they didn’t have the opportunity to kill plays in the neutral zone and spent most of their effort getting back to force dumps or get in an in-zone structure.
Unfortunately, based on high danger passing metrics, xGA and GA, we know that the Blue Jackets weren’t good in their set structure so they didn’t have a chance to exploit whatever potential advantage they may have had by forcing uncontrolled dump-ins.
Retrievals
Connected to their capacity to force dump-ins or kill neutral zone offense are the dump-in retrievals. The Blue Jackets, especially through the period of tracked games, are exceptionally poor at retrieving the puck. They had the second most failed retrievals of any team in the NHL. Werenski’s early adjustment period certainly contributed but Provorov, Gudbranson, Boqvist and Jiricek didn’t really help either.
It would be too easy to simply write this off as poor neutral zone defense putting the defensemen in a bad position but it certainly didn’t help.
Zone Exits
Similar to their inability to retrieve the puck cleanly, the Blue Jackets were, additionally, poor exiters of the zone. Total exits were worse than possession exits suggesting that there is some skill somewhere on the roster but that they are far from expressing a cohesive exit strategy.
What wasn’t captured in that viz was the amount of “failed exits” from the Columbus Blue Jackets. I wrote about how this tendency, especially in the case of the Provorov-Gudbranson pairing, was a primary culprit in the case of blown-leads, but the Blue Jackets struggled across the board.
I wouldn’t read too much into the correlation, at least for the moment, but there are a lot of “underperforming” teams near the top of that list and plenty of “overperformers” near the bottom.
Connecting the Dots
Growing Pains
I think there’s something to be said about all of Columbus, Buffalo and Ottawa being bottom of the NHL Cycle/Forecheck offense and the later corresponding metrics as well. Namely, that each of these teams believed they were ready to compete for the playoffs and all of them fell far short. All three have technically fired their coach this season, depending on how you evaluate Mike Babcock.
Early in the season, these teams tried to convert to a more “playoff style” hockey. In doing so, they undermined the talents of their roster and became almost aggressively mediocre. They lost their identity and all of them ended the season at the bottom of the standings.
Largely, that might be “the plan.” Each team wasn’t satisfied with their performance and didn’t think it would yield long term success. Instead of moving pieces around on their roster they simply asked the team to play a different style. Maybe the GMs needed the season-long data to decide which core pieces couldn’t adapt and therefore no longer fit.
Especially in the case of the Blue Jackets’ sample, the poor results should be expected, to a certain extent. Hockey is simply too fast and deeply ingrained habits and instincts are therefore far too important for total system/playstyle switches to happen easily.
Once we add the New York Islanders and Washington Capitals to the picture, we get a clearer look at just how desperate the Eastern Conferences was this past season.
The Islanders played a majority of the season with Lane Lambert as a head coach who implemented a similar system to Pascal Vincent and had similarly putrid results. Under Patrick Roy they played more aggressively and got better.
The Washington Capitals simply limped into the playoffs and get demolished. Their total season goal differential was abysmal and their extreme goal sequencing (the order in which they scored goals vs their competition) meant they lucked into the playoffs.
The Blue Jackets are going to have to improve hand over fist if they want to approach the playoffs next season. Their results this past season were quite thoroughly earned. If expectations were removed the picture, these growing pains were bound to happen.
Disconnectedness
Here, I think it’s worth mentioning the prioritization of the “north” mindset in transition. The idea was that the Blue Jackets needed to attack quickly before opposition teams could get set. It didn’t work, for quite a few reasons.
Philadelphia, for example, killed aggressively in the neutral zone and became a good transition team because of that. They exploited the “rubber banding” effect of teams trying to attack through the neutral zone. If you kill forwards when they are trying to enter the zone, they have to quickly reorganize and as such aren’t able to be in structure.
Unfortunately, that isn’t really how the Blue Jackets’ structure operates. They (like Vegas) prefer to get in structure early and rely on blocked shots and conserved energy to counterattack from the defensive zone. What Vegas is good at, though, is blocking those shots and in playing slow through the neutral zone to attack faster, something the Blue Jackets are far from mastering (exemplified by the poor entry to chance conversion).
The Blue Jackets tried to stretch the zone quickly with cross lane passes or stretch passing from their defensemen. The expanded early and relied on difficult to execute passes to attack extremely quickly. This separated their forwards from their defensemen and resulted in extreme vulnerability in the event that their high difficulty passes failed.
Vegas, and Boston for that matter, didn’t express the same need for speed through the neutral zone. They attacked quickly when the situation called for it but otherwise preferred controlled breakouts and regroups. By moving slowly through the neutral zone they sacrificed quick strike offense for more security in possession. Stretching the zone and playing chips, indirect passes to the neutral zone is cheating for quick offense, slow and controlled breakouts are not safe but less dangerous (unless you have skilled playmakers).
This has a twofold impact on their gameplay. First, their skilled forwards develop rhythm and connection with their teammates. Second, they improve their shot suppression simply because they are more ready to defend in the case of turnovers.
This worked, especially for Vegas, because they had a strong forecheck and had no problem disrupting opposition breakouts. This meant that they had plenty of neutral zone regroup opportunities from which to create offense.
Instead of trying really hard to create offense from the first wave of attack, they instead transported the puck safely to the offensive zone and relied on second waves of attacks from opposition offensive zone turnovers, failed exits or zone clears.
The Blue Jackets could never establish these second waves and these are partially all related.
Their eagerness to enter the zone undermines their ability to find passing rhythm and relationships with teammates which degrades their ability to enter the zone cleanly which results in poor shot quality. Because their shots aren’t dangerous and come from the sticks of the puck carriers, goalies have an easy time managing rebounds and the Blue Jackets have a hard time recovering pucks.
The other Blue Jackets players are behind the play and skating hard to catch up and, as a result, not in a good position to stop breakouts in the event of a recovered puck which means they have to reverse course and concede exits. The opposition is exiting quickly and with control which means defensemen have to concede weak gaps and absorb pressure instead of looking for turnovers.
The Blue Jackets forwards aren’t prolific back-checkers, partially because of their inability to slow down breakouts, which means the defensemen are further unable to step up aggressively.
This results in CBJ defense having to retrieve pucks under significant pressure or simply conceding zone time to get to their Box+1 spots. Extended zone time, as a result of coaching for passivity, means they don’t have the legs to counterattack after blocked shots. Poor defensive zone play leads to poor zone exits.
Furthermore, the forwards often didn’t work for puck battle wins in the corners because they felt the need to continue to cover their spot which resulted, again, in being disconnected from their defensemen who were often fighting multiple opposition players for possession. This lead to attempted chipped pucks out and the vicious cycle continued.
Now, this is simple a perhaps overexaggerated single narrative of an event of play and hockey is very rarely played in this single sequence of events. Still, the Blue Jackets very clearly have a connectiveness issue as well as a passing issue.
Vegas was able to succeed because they have plenty of veteran players who have stable NHL skillsets and who can play through possession, or through conservative defense, and still execute when the situations demands.
The Blue Jackets were full of young players, risky or unskilled veteran defensemen and veteran forwards who weren’t particularly good at passing the puck. In short, teamwork and connectiveness were in short supply exacerbated by a frenetic north mindset.
Wrap-Up
The Blue Jackets 2023-2024 season was an outright failure in many regards. One made worse by expectations and roster building that were at-odds with eachother. The roster was a square peg, the system and expectations a round hole. As a result, this review, and the microstats, feels really bad.
Fortunately, that means we can only really go upward from here. From that HockeyViz season review, we can see that there was indeed a stretch where the Blue Jackets performed adequately at 5v5 according to the expected goals.
Soon, I’ll analyze that stretch of gameplay and see if there’s anything we can learn about the Blue Jackets performance to take into the next season.
In a coming article, I’ll go back to some of the film and highlight some specific areas of improvement and deficiency as far as the Blue Jackets players go. Here, we can start to get an idea of certain skillsets the Blue Jackets can target or at the very least develop as the new GM begins to construct their roster.
This season should only represent a total failure for the organization if they fail to learn from it. Coming out of this season with a 9.5% chance at Macklin Celebrini and at the very least a top six pick could very well round-out a very strong pool of young players.
Additionally, I’ve got a couple of GM-related overviews coming down the pipeline, so stay tuned as we head further into the off-season!