A three-game skid with the shot share intact

The surface story of the week is a team that ran out of road. The Boogeymen closed it on 3 straight losses. The last of them turned the skid into a slide. The one before it was the worst 6s loss of the season, 7-2 to JERSEY CITY DEMONS. Read only the ending and the week looks like a slide that started on Saturday and will keep going.

The numbers tell a different story once the ending stops doing all the talking. The week went 5-4-1, and the trend that runs through all five weeks of the run is shot share. It has held every time. Four weeks ago the Boogeymen out-shot opponents 79 to 44. The week after, it was 79 to 37. Then came 98 to 57. After that, 465 to 318 in the busiest week of the run. This week it was 173 to 123. In every one of those weeks the club put more pucks on net than it allowed, and this week was no exception.

Goals are where the weeks come apart. Four weeks ago, goals ran 23 to 13. The week after, they ran 28 to 8. This week, across 10 games, they ran 34 to 29. The shot gap is still there. The goal gap has thinned to almost nothing. When shots and goals stop agreeing, the place to look is the space between them, and this week that space is the net.

The AI goalies carried the week in goal. Jonas Wagner played 5 games and stopped 82.3% of the shots he faced. Matteo Lehmann played 4 games and stopped 72.7%. Three games this week were meltdowns in net. Two of them were Lehmann games, and the third belonged to Wagner.

Lehmann's week is the cleanest example of noise in the whole sample. He was in net for both shutouts, against Real knickerbockers and Long Island Mermen, and he faced 2 shots and then 7 in those games. He was also in net for the 5-4 loss to The Smurfs, an upset, where he faced 15 shots. And he was in net for the 7-2 loss, where he faced 20. The same goalie produced the best games and the worst games of the week. Reading a direction into that is how a desk talks itself into a story the numbers never wrote.

Now the part that holds up. Igor Orlov scored 15 goals in 7 games this week. Against USA Hockey Club he scored 4, on 9 shots, a career high in 6s. That is a big week by any reading, and it came from volume. Shots like that are the kind of production that travels from one week to the next.

Joey Flopfish reached 100 points this title. His week added 16 points in 10 games. Against Long Island Mermen he had 4 assists, a career high in 6s, from the back end in a 4-0 win. He also ended an 8-game goal drought during the week.

Erb reached 50 assists this title. His point streak ended at 20 games, in the 7-2 loss. A streak that long ending in the worst 6s loss of the season says more about that game than about him.

One loss belongs in a different column. The 5-3 defeat to Eastervillians was a 3s game. In that mode, numbers only compare with other 3s numbers. Joey Flopfish scored 3 there, a big game in that mode, and it stays in the 3s column. The Directors Cut beat the Boogeymen 3-2 in a game that ended early.

So the cold read is this. Shot share is the signal, and it has held for five weeks. The save percentages are the noise, and the 3-game skid sits squarely on them. A real decline would show in the shot share first, and the shot share shows none. Until the shots turn, this was a goaltending week in the box score and nothing more. The record stands at 40-14-5, and the shots say the skid is the exception.

The shot share holds next week, and the goals against drift back toward what the shots predict.