What's Going Wrong with the Colorado Avalanche and Will It Be Fixed in 2014-15?

Seven games into the 2014-15 NHL season, all is not well for Denver’s hockey team.

After a brilliant resurgence under first-year head coach Patrick Roy last season—one which won him the Jack Adams Award as the league’s best bench boss—the Colorado Avalanche now look a lot more like the 2012-13 team that won the right to draft Nathan MacKinnon first overall than 2013-14’s Central Division champions.

With just one win in the team’s first six games heading into action on Tuesday, a home game against the perpetually weak Florida Panthers represented a chance for the team to get back on track.

Instead, Florida won in overtime, which prompted Roy to question his team’s level of desire in his postgame press conference:

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Right now, the way I look at it is we want an easy game. Until we’re going to want to compete at the level that we were last year, we’re going to struggle. We’re not sharp mentally, we’re making bad decisions, we make too many giveaways, we’re losing easy one-on-one battles. We’re going to give 35 shots per night. This is a game of one-on-one battles.

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It’s an interesting comment, in particular because the one easily verifiable fact that Roy mentioned was the Avs' tendency to give up a lot of shots. He’s right, of course. A quick glance at NHL.com shows that Colorado ranks 28th in the NHL in shots against per game at 35.7.

Where he’s wrong is with the implication that this is a new thing, a radical departure from the team’s success last season.

In 2013-14, the team allowed 32.7 shots per game, which ranked 25th in the league. The difference between the Avs and the oft-ridiculed Edmonton Oilers in that department was basically a rounding error.

In short, the Avs are worse defensively early this year than they were last season, but not so much worse that it should be a team-killer. So why is it that a team which won 52 games last season is suddenly 1-4-2 to start the year?

Scoring more goals than the other team is what drives wins, so really that question comes down to asking why the Avs are being outscored this year when they outscored their opposition a year ago.

There are four primary factors that contribute to goal differential: shots for, shooting percentage, shots against and save percentage. The following chart shows the degree to which each of those four factors is driving the change this year:

Data via war-on-ice.com

There’s been a tiny dip in the number of shots the Avs take, and a larger negative turn in the number of shots they allow this year.

Even combined, however, the impact of shots for and against represents less than 20 percent of Colorado’s goal-differential problem. The big problems are save percentage (24 percent of the issue) and shooting percentage (a whopping 58 percent of the problem).

This is both good news and bad news for the Avalanche.

Let’s start with the good news. Both shooting percentage and save percentage have an element of luck to them. I like to think of taking a shot like rolling a set of loaded dice: A more talented shooter has the dice weighted in his favour and a less talented shooter has them weighted against him, but in either case, chance is involved.

The same is true, but in reverse, for goalies and save percentage. That means that while the rolls are certainly influenced by talent, sometimes there will be a prolonged stretch where they go against even good shooters or goalies and there’s just nothing to be done about it.

Brian Bahr/Getty Images

This is something Roy himself gave evidence of understanding during his playing days.

Tim Barnes, an analytics genius who is now employed by the Washington Capitals, recalled on his website (invitation only) a game in which Roy allowed five goals. Asked if he’d played poorly, Roy replied something to the effect of "No, they just made their shots."

That happens sometimes.

In Colorado’s case, both the team’s shooting percentage (6.1 percent in all situations) and the team’s save percentage (.904 in all situations) are due for improvement.

The Avs aren’t so talentless that they’re going to shoot that far below the NHL average over the long haul. Similarly, the team’s goaltending should get better very soon once players return to health.

The bad news is that Colorado’s success in 2013-14 was built on a high save percentage and a high shooting percentage. The consensus among the analytics community has been that those numbers were going to regress this year, and when they did, the Avs would tumble down the NHL standings.

Colorado’s players and management argued against that, citing shot quality. In late September, Roy went so far as to tell Yahoo Sports’ Nicholas J. Cotsonika that he wasn't worried about shots against.

"It’s a bit the way we want to play. We’re an offensive team. We’re a team that want to go on offense. We have the speed and the skills up front. We gave up a lot of shots, yes. But it’s not a concern to us," he said.

One win and six losses later, Roy has apparently changed his mind about how dangerous it is to give up shots against in volume. That’s understandable, given that a lot more of those shots are ending up in the net and Colorado’s shooters are suddenly firing blanks.

History suggests they Avs will get better, but it also tells us that it’s extremely unlikely that the magic of 2013-14 is going to come back any time soon.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work. Statistics via war-on-ice.com and NHL.com.