What’s Going on in Boston?

If you’re a PHF fan or a fan of hockey who stumbled onto this article you’ve seen post after post on social media about Corinne Schroeder and games where she has a lot of saves. This would make sense if she played for a not great team. Instead she’s playing for the Boston Pride who are first in the PHF as of this posting and it’s not like the Pride have been historically weak defensively either. In the history of the Boston Pride they’ve only had two goalies (+7 starts) who have seen more than 30 Shots Against/60.

First was Katie Burt last season (21/22) who saw 33.3 SA/60 and now Corinne Schroeder at 38.6 SA/60. Now the first thought you probably have is did the blueline lose talent? One could argue that they’ve gotten better on the blueline. They’ve had Kaleigh Fratkin, Jenna Rheault, and Lauren Kelly from the low SA/60 days then added Olympian Kali Flanagan, Aneta Tejralová as well as Olivia Zafuto whose had a great career so far from the NCAA to the SDHL. On forward the additions have been Loren Gabel, Élizabeth Giguère, Allie Thunstrom, Taylor Wenczkowski, etc to an Isobel Cup winning core. One of the most dominant teams in PHF history…and they have the highest SA/60 in the PHF this season.

So this begs the general question what’s going on in Boston? From there two questions are spawned, the first being why are so many shots getting through to Schroeder and how is Schroeder putting up such crazy numbers? Off the cuff I’d love to just say watch the games. Obviously though that would make for a poor article and we all see different perspectives. Now I will say if you can do watch the games as it’s great additional context. For the purposes of this article though we need to press on without that video context.

What I’m seeing on the ice is fantastic defensively play from the Boston Pride to funnel opposing teams into playing into Schroeder’s strengths. A quick description of Schroeder would be a goalie with a large frame, decent mobility/agility with good reactions, and great positioning. She didn’t post a 0.952 SV% at Quinnipiac last season through luck. She’s this very consistent wall of goalie equipment that knows where she needs to be and what the angles are. There’s not many goalies like this so players don’t know how to quite approach the situation where Paul Mara and co. takes advantage of that by having his players focus on cutting off passes and just letting shots be taken.

The Pride are essentially giving opposing puck carriers two options, you take a clear shot on net or try to force a pass that has a high chance of not only failing but also a turnover and quick transition headed the opposite direction. Most players in either men’s or women’s hockey will take the shot. A shot is better than nothing right? Only the shot is almost always a clear shot where Schroeder is already set for. The Pride even allow drives to the net but you have to come in on a tight angle & by the time you’re a foot away there’s no net left to shoot at however you try anyways. This strategy doesn’t work if your goalie is inconsistent, can’t hold their edges, and is not great positionally. It works in Boston because it’s just such a perfect fit between team and goalie. Schroeder is doing great, the Pride are just also doing a lot of great work keeping it manageable/easy for Schroeder.

This all sounds great but we need more evidence or else this is just the equivalent of yelling into the void. The stats can’t back this up directly or at least the public ones can’t. The internal analytics might confirm what I’m saying but we can never know as no team is going to offer that up publicly. Is there any proof out there that can back up my claim? The fact that I’m writing this means yes, I do believe there is evidence, while not directly, supporting my claim.

I want to first start with the shot rates, both for and against of each team. If you look at the chart above you’ll notice that the Boston Pride ensure both goalies earn that paycheque. You’d expect a dominant team like Boston to be closer to Connecticut where the shot quite often but don’t allow a whole lot of shots against. We don’t have Shot Attempts to go off of here just Shots on Goal which makes it easier for the shots to mislead us in terms of who has the most possession however it’s safe to say the Boston Pride like challenging teams to track meets.

And why wouldn’t they as you’ll see in this chart they have the 2nd highest shooting % in the PHF. They figure if they get a lot of shots they’ll get a lot of goals especially if the ones shooting a lot are the likes of Allie Thunstrom, Loren Gabel, and Jillian Dempsey. The downside of opening the game up like that is it opens you up to shots against so the Pride make a compromise in which they’ll allow shots but funnel them towards the strengths of Schroeder & take away the high danger chances.

The key to forcing the opposing team to play on your terms is forcing them to be desperate/play under pressure and you do that by forcing them to play catch up. Due to the lack of coding skills I was only able to do this for Boston though I do believe it fits what we see on the ice and what can generally be considered common sense.

We see that with the score tied the shot rates are generally the same for Boston in all situations. They pit their talent against yours and say let’s see who has the better shooters. The opposing team has the edge in shots but a ~3 shot difference means not a whole lot to the Pride with how they play defensively. What the Pride are good at though is ensuring the score does not remain tied for long. They score 1st ~73% of the time and they score early too at around 9 minutes into the game.

The pressure is put on early but any half decent coach or player isn’t going to panic a whole lot about a 1-0 deficit 1/6 into a game. You see this in the shot rates when Boston leads by a goal that the shots for goes up while the shots against go down. There’s two reasonable assumptions you can make here, the Pride are sensing blood in the water and going in for the kill or the opposing team doesn’t want to go down 2-0 so they tighten it up cutting into their offence. Or it’s a little column a, little column b.

Here’s the issue though for teams playing the Boston Pride, they’re the best team in the league at taking a 2-0 lead. They’ve taken a 2-0 lead 8/15 times this season which is the most in the PHF. Only Connecticut is close with having done it 6 times whereas every other team has at most taken a 2-0 lead 3 times. More often than not halfway through the game you have to open it back up to try to overcome a 2-0 deficit and if you look at how often they lead by 2 or more goals it’s only 40 minutes behind how much they’ve been tied in games this season.

There are four teams better than the Pride at getting a 2 goal lead early in the game: the Whale, Six, Riveters, and Beauts. What those teams lack compared to the Pride is that the Pride just do it more often so the game script is Boston goes up early and teams are firing anything on net to just get one goal. It’s a tough strategy to pull off when the team you’re facing is the Pride who are almost just as likely in a game to get a +3 goal lead than they are to trail.

So why don’t teams such as the Six or the Whale have similar shot rates to the Pride? For one neither plays the same way as the Pride do and while we don’t know the reasons exactly the reason the Pride do it is because they have the best depth in the league. Also no PHF team ends up in the same game score situations as the Pride do. The Whitecaps have had a 2-goal at least once in a game 8 times which is the same as the Pride but the Whitecaps often get that 2-goal lead in the 3rd period whereas the Pride get it before half the game is done. That leaves more time for opposing teams to panic and force bad shots on goal. The issue with the Whale is they’re not forcing teams into panic mode enough. Teams are happy to get into games where the Whale might be outshooting them but it’s not making a difference so they stick to the game plan making it difficult for the Whale to cause panic and the forced, bad shots that come with that.

So what the eye test and stats are telling us is that the Pride are the best team at forcing opposing teams to play into their game script by getting out to not just early leads but leads that cause panic then ensuring a predictable night for Schroeder and co. This isn’t to say that any goalie or any team would find success in this exact same scenario. What I am saying is that the Pride deserve a lot of credit for how they are playing, how they are forcing how the game is played and finding a great goalie to fit what they are doing turning her from a great goalie into a dominating goalie.

When you see the numbers Schroeder has this season it’s easy to think she’s carrying the Boston Pride & keeping the team afloat. It’s a lot more nuanced than that. Schroeder is playing her part about as well as you can but the part isn’t keeping the team afloat. Her part is to work in concert with the team who is funneling shots to her in predictable ways and she has to be very consistent in dealing with those shots. Chaos is rare in the Pride defensive zone.