Ron Wilson’s effect on goalies
By Cam Charron
11 years ago
Even though Ron Wilson has been fired, it’s still interesting to look back on his career and what he did with his goaltenders. Like I mentioned earlier, Dave Tippett and Ken Hitchcock’s goalies can expect higher save percentages in those systems.
Wilson, however, well, let’s just say the goaltending record in his time as coach was awful. The Leafs have bounced from below-average starter to below-average starter. The Leafs haven’t had a goaltender play 50 games in a season since Vesa Toskala in 2008-2009, and they haven’t had a goalie play 50 games in three consecutive seasons since Curtis Joseph between 1999-2002.
So, what to make of Wilson’s record? As you’ll see after the jump, the first thing is that Wilson has coached a lot of respectfully mediocre goaltenders in his career:
This is only since 1998 so it doesn’t include his tenure with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim which ended in the 1996-1997 season. This season could be the first since the Disney Expansion where Wilson won’t be a coach for at least part of it, but given the short season, there may not be much of a chance for teams to hire and fire coaches without resorting to an assistant as an interim. Anything could happen though.
Another fun fact here is that Wilson actually coached Vesa Toskala twice, both in San Jose and in Toronto. Here is the same list of goalies without Wilson behind the bench:
We have almost double the amount of shots from Carlyle’s sample. EV SV%+ is an adjusted metric, where .900 is essentially what a league average goalie would put up. That’s calculated using the Exp SV stat I have, which is “expected saves” based on the number of saves a league-average goalie would have made in the same time-span.
Wilson’s goalies are slightly worse off with him than without, but that could be random sample. Look at Jean-Sebastien Giguere, who had a terrific hockey career if not for one-and-a-half terribles seasons in Toronto.
Maybe I’d chalk it up to age, but Giguere had a .924 EV SV% last season with Colorado, so there’s still some ability left in him. Indubitably, Wilson had no idea what to do with the defence and goaltenders he was handed. Predictably, everything collapsed.
So this next chart here is going to show those combined goalies with and without Ron Wilson, and the bottom two lines is going to exclude anything accrued during Wilson’s time with the Toronto Maple Leafs. That strikes Raycroft and Giguere and some of Toskala:
The goalies Wilson had were not impressive. If you eliminate his time in Toronto, Wilson had no effect on his goaltenders. If you include his time with the Leafs, “no effect” becomes “close to negligible effect” if you can get over the idea that JS Giguere had one-and-a-half miserable years.
What did we learn here? Well, other than Olaf Kolzig is pretty average, it appears goaltenders playing under Ron Wilson’s system don’t see their statlines affected.
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