Penguins Team Defense: Shot Distance Edition

Earlier this week, I took a stab at evaluating the Penguins' team defense by comparing how many scoring chances they gave up to the rest of the league. Today, I'm going to look at defensive performance--and what that again means for Marc-Andre Fleury--by measuring shot distances. The data is limited to even strength shots against over the last five years (courtesy of Super Shot Search). The usual caveats with location data apply.

The table below contains the breakdown of how many shots against the Penguins gave up from different ranges (0-10 feet, etc.).

With those numbers established, I broke down the proportion of total even strength shots against for each range over the last five years.

Those numbers don't mean a lot without a reference point. In the Adjusted Save Percentage article I mentioned in my last piece, there is a table with the league average for each range based on the 2013-14 season. Though it isn't five years of data, it likely didn't change much from year to year. So we can compare our five-year Penguins numbers to those averages in the chart below.

Overall, the Penguins did a better job than league average at limiting shots from 0-10 feet, but were worse in terms of allowing shots from 10-20 feet. The difference in 10-20 feet shots isn't large, though, and it illustrates that the Penguins were never as defensively incompetent as some thought.

We can also look at how these numbers changed over the years to see when the Penguins got better at limiting quality chances against. Below are a series of line graphs for each shot range that show, year-by-year, how many shots in each category the Penguins gave up. I'd like to report them all as raw numbers, but since the 12-13 season was shortened by a lockout, I've presented them on a per-game basis.

There's a trend above. After the 2011-12 season, the Penguins did a better job of preventing shots from 0-30 feet, and started forcing more shots from 30+ feet out that are inherently less dangerous. Again, I'm not sure what (if anything) changed for the Penguins system-wise following the loss to the Flyers in the 2012 playoffs. But to the extent they did something to become better at limiting quality shots, they achieved that.

Since the Penguins got better at defense in the last two years, we should look at Fleury's save percentage to see if he saw a similar bump.

No bump. Fleury's numbers in the shortened 2012-13 season are not much different from the 2010-11 season, despite the Penguins giving up fewer quality chances in 2013. And Fleury's numbers for this past season were bad despite an overall improvement in team defense.

This jives with the other data we have for Marc-Andre Fleury and Pittsburgh's team defense. It highlights (again) that it is not the system in front holding Fleury back from reaching his potential. Hopefully the front office is aware of this as they begin talks to extend Fleury.