Leafs played 12 back to backs in the first 23 games.... and 12 in 47 for keefe. How did being tired effect their results?
More and more teams are going to 1A and 1B tandems... is this a coincidence or is there stats that are leading teams to do this?
Look forward to your expert analysis and evidence based research on how this could not effected outcomes...
Fact is...it is too early for anyone to be right and know if keefe is the better coach. But we can speculate.
It was still the same number of back-to-backs, just over a larger stretch of time. I'm not going to go into how much having back-to-backs in a short period of time vs. a long period of time affects how teams perform, but it was not like this was a one year problem. We struggled on back-to-backs from day 1 under Babcock. Even when we had a capable backup and we had back-to-backs spread out over an entire season. Every team has back-to-backs, and it is not like we've been screwed by the schedule every season. For some reason, we were either tired or not prepared for them, and we often sucked relative to many other good teams.Hutch was just the first goalie who really showed that we suck on back-to-backs. Sparks did too at the end of the 2018-2019 season, but was good at the beginning. If it was not for McElhinney having the best 30 games of his life at the end of 2016-2017 and into 2018-2019 (performances he never really replicated despite playing on much better defensive teams the next two subsequent seasons), it likely would have been the same in 2016-2017.
The idea for improvement should not solely rest on the fact that our backup needs to steal games in order for us to win a back-to-back, because that is effectively what every backup under Babcock has done, besides Hutchinson. That is not what successful teams on a back-to-back rely upon.
As for the 1A/1B approach, it depends on how you are defining it. A 50-30 split is not a 1A/1B approach. That's an approach that many coaches have been using for a long time, and it does not require the backup to be "1B" quality. If you are talking about splitting the games equally between the starter and backup, then few good teams do that:
- Washington did it the year they won because Holtby was sucking for a long stretch of time.
- St. Louis kind of did it because they had terrible goaltending to start and then eventually just rode Binnington as much as possible after January.
- Other playoff teams, like Carolina and Edmonton, do it because they have two below-average starters who are not good.
- The Penguins kind of did it too because Murray kept getting injured and has been wildly inconsistent the past few years.
- Same goes for Boston in 2018-2019 where Rask got hurt, so Halak took over.
So mostly, teams did it out of necessity, not by choice. Teams are trying to get a split of 50-30 (or 55-25) if possible, and they will often run 1 goalie in the playoffs. They just want to keep their goalies fresh for the playoffs. Babcock was one of the few coaches who did not believe in that. Even when he had a backup goalie who had the best save percentage in the league (McElhinney), he only started him 15 times. If you want to confirm, I would bet that it was only on back-to-backs and IIRC, he started one or two standalone games because Andersen was injured (although that may have been 2016-2017, not 2017-2018). Dubas is not telling him to do that. If anything, Dubas is probably telling him to do the exact opposite, because he likely knows the analytics about goalie usage, and understands that it is tough for a goalie to only play once every couple of weeks. Goalies prefer getting into a rhythm and are often used to playing a decent amount. Just ask Andersen, who wants to play as many games as possible because he says he wants to be in a rhythm. However, under Babcock, our backups are never really given that chance, and the only guy who has really had success with it was a guy who had been used to playing sparingly as a backup for his entire 10+ year career.
Dubas' original plan was to have Sparks back (he gave him an extension in early March), but Sparks rubbed someone (probably Babcock) the wrong way and was exiled. Dubas then had to find someone to replace him for cheap in a market with few good options (and all of said options receiving overpayments for the most part) and ultimately settled on a guy that Babcock liked and was familiar: Hutchinson. If Dubas had his way, and assuming Sparks did not say something behind the scenes that was totally disparaging to his image, then Sparks likely would have been the backup this year... And I can say that the odds were in favour of Sparks doing significantly better than Hutch this year, because he had done significantly better than Hutch the prior two years as well. Maybe he still would have needed to be upgraded, but at least we should have been away from the fringes of the playoffs and there is a much better market for backups this year than last year.
Now, hopefully everything is resolved. It only cost us a good depth player we can easily replace in Moore, and 2 3rds... Plus we were able to get Clifford at 50% (who probably would have cost Moore + the conditional 3rd on his own anyways; paying a mid-3rd for a high end cheap backup with term is a great deal). We have two good goalies who have proven that they can perform, and we have a coach who should hopefully make our team more prepared for back-to-backs, and hopefully the playoffs, than Babcock.
