Thank you for that. My reasoning for ignoring the goaltending aspect is 2 fold.
As you said, it's been covered. My point in these posts is to point out what is not being said. So why point out what is? I'm not saying Bannister is as good or a better coach. I've explicitly said the opposite. But I think the gap is not as big as the numbers indicate. And his struggles this season were definitely impacted by the Thomas injury. Monty has definitely benefited from Fowler. When Badger was discussing xGF 5v5, goaltending is irrelevant, but a 1C and top pair D isn't.
The 2nd reason is that the head coach affects goaltending. The scheme in front of the goalie, the deployment, usage, ability to motivate can affect goaltender performance, and those are determined by the coach. Do I point out how much better Schenn and Parayko are playing under Monty? No because the players are the same and I cannot discount the role Monty played in them playing really well.
Do I think Monty mishandled the goalies, no. But I cannot completely divorce the performance of the same goalies with the same goalie coach from the head coach. How much does coaching account for their poor perfirmance? <shrug> I'd want to drill down in the stats to look at advanced goalie stats over stretches of games instead of seasons. Thats more than I know how to given public tools.
Besides, going back to reason 1, that is outside the scope of what I am really trying to convey. Which is just to say, Bannister did well last year, and he got some bad breaks this year. Montgomery isn't coming in and turning the team into a playoff team either. There are reasons both ways. It's not as black and whiteas Drew bad, Monty god.
I'd put much more stock into the head coach negatively impacting the goalies if we were allowing more chances. But all the underlying numbers and my eyes say that we are allowing significantly less high danger chances than we were before. If the goalies play worse when the chances they are facing get easier, I view that squarely as a goalie problem and not a coaching problem. I very much don't believe that a winning strategy is to play worse defensively to maximize your goalie's performance.
Here are stats by date per Natural Stat Trick, which allows you to filter by date ranges. Team rankings are all are per 60.
Under Bannister's entire tenure the Blues were 27th in expected goals against, 28th in high danger chances against, and 27th in scoring chances against in all situations. They were 27th in expected goals against, 28th in high danger chances against, and 28th in scoring chances against at 5 on 5. Just looking at Bannister's tenure last season, they were 28th in expected goals against, 29th in high danger chances against, and 26th in scoring chances against in all situations. They were 29th in expected goals against, 29th in high danger chances against, and 28th in scoring chances against at 5 on 5.
Any way you slice it, the Blues were a bad defensive hockey team under Bannister.
Since Monty took over, the Blues are 4th in expected goals against, 1st in high danger chances against, and 5th in scoring chances against in all situations. At 5 on 5, they are 5th in expected goals against, 2nd in high danger chances against, and 8th in scoring chances against per 60. That is dramatic improvement. I agree with your point that it isn't all coaching. The personnel on the blue line has improved by a healthy margin.
We are 11th in goals allowed per 60 under Bannister (underperforming the team defense a bit) while we were 12th in goals against per 60 under Bannister last season and 14th in his total tenure (massively overperforming the team defense). So let's turn out attention to the goalies.
The goalies stopped 22.5 goals above expected under Bannister's total tenure here and 29.3 goals above expected if we just look at their numbers under Bannister last season. Binner's raw SV% last season was .915 and Hofer's was .922. Binner's raw SV% over Bannister's entire tenure was .908 while Hofer's was .915.
They have allowed 1.8 above expected under Monty. Binner's raw SV% under Monty is .902 while Hofer's is .913.
All of the stats say that the team defense has substantially improved and that the goalies are playing worse. A decline in raw SV% while facing noticeably less dangerous chances absolutely indicates a decline in performance. To be clear, I'm not saying that the goalies are playing terrible. I'm not saying that I have long term concerns about the goaltending. But they aren't close to playing how they were before and how they were playing before got us a massive chunk of standings points that the team probably didn't deserve. Potentially making the playoffs this year was always going to require the goalies to play at (or near) the level they did last year and they simply have not done that.
