By Kurt Bullard
After Pittsburgh Penguins starting goalie Matt Murray allowed four goals in the first two periods of Game 4 against the Tampa Bay Lightning, head coach Mike Sullivan brought in Marc-Andre Fleury to start the third period. Fleury didnât allow a goal on the seven shots he faced in the last twenty minutes while the Penguins almost eliminated a four-goal deficit behind Phil Kessel and Evgeni Malkin, ultimately falling 4-3.
After the game, most of the post-game conversationâboth in the Penguinsâ presser and the NBC Sportsâ post-game showâwas about who Sullivan would throw in net for a pivotal Game 5 matchup. Such talk seemed like an overreaction to a below-average performance from Murray. Fleury, who does not have the most pristine playoff history himself, only made seven saves in the entire frame. Murray let up four goalsâone of which was on the man-advantageâon 30 shots, which is not a horrific performance, especially against the Lightning.
Most of the rationale for proposing the switch seemed to center around Fleury, and how he would be able to carry his solid performance back to Pittsburgh. This was being said even though Murray had a higher save percentage and lower goals allowed average in the regular season than did Marc-Andre, even though Fleury did play more games.
Itâs pretty simple to check whether or not there actually was a âmomentumâ factor for Marc-Andre this year in his goaltending performances. If the last gameâs performance affected his next game, then regressing the current gameâs save percentage against the previous gameâs save percentage should yield a significant coefficient for the last game. That is to say, knowing how Fleury performed in the last game would affect your estimate of how he’d play in the next game more so than just using his season average save rate.
I ran the regression on the 45 games in which Fleury had played the previous game, because this”momentum” probably did not exist after a benching. Doing so yields the below regression coefficients, which shows that the previous gameâs performance does not have an effect on Fleuryâs next game.
I also ran another regression, with this one adding the days in between as a predictor to see if you could tease out âmomentumâ by looking at the days in between starts.
Again, this shows that there was no effect from the previous game for Fleury this season. While obviously one would want to look at film to supplement this decision-making, it appears that the best predictor of how Fleury performs is simply his season save percentage, which, again, was lower than Murrayâs this season.
Goalies can have bad games, and thereâs nothing you can really do about it. It happens. But coaches do have the power to not make rash decisions. Seven saves shouldnât get you a starting nod in the conference finals, especially when your career playoff save percentage is a meager  .906. This may have been Fleuryâs team at the start of the season, but Murray is the captain now, and one bad day in the crease shouldnât lead to a mutiny.
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