The goals gap closed while the shot count stayed with the Boogeymen

Last week's prediction said Joey Flopfish would cross the round-number goal mark and the Boogeymen would win more full-sized games than they lose. Flopfish reached 100 goals this title, but the club won only 2 of 5 full-sized games, so the call missed.

Credit the best game of the week first, because it came before the slide. The Boogeymen beat Wordles 9-2 on Monday, June 8. Joey Flopfish scored 4 goals and had 6 points. For a forward whose 6s average is 1.4 goals, that is a big game, and it needs no asterisk. Silky had 6 points, 5 of them assists. Erb had 5 points from defence, with a 6s career high of 4 assists. The Boogeymen out-shot Wordles 27 to 6 and spent 855 seconds on attack, both unusually high marks.

Then the record turned. The same Monday ended with a 4-3 overtime loss to Brotha from anotha motha, an upset in a 3s game. It ended a 5-game win streak. That one earns a shrug more than an alarm: Matteo Lehmann stopped 4 of 8 shots.

Three more losses followed. The cup knights won 6-4 on Wednesday, in 3s. On Friday, June 12, Rink Roosters won 4-2. Apparently 67ers then won 3-1. That made 4 losses in a row, the longest losing streak of the season, and the concern there is fair. Makaveli the don then fell 3-1, and that ended the losing streak. Igor Orlov had 2 goals and 20 hits in that win. Jonas Wagner stopped 12 of 13 shots. The week ended in a 7-6 overtime loss.

The surface story is a collapse. The numbers describe something narrower. The attack did not go anywhere: the Boogeymen out-shot opponents 150 to 101 over the week. The only game in which they were out-shot was the 3s loss to The cup knights, 18 to 17. The week before, the count was 153 to 120. Shot volume is intact.

What moved is the distance between goals for and goals against. In the week of Monday, May 18, the Boogeymen scored 162 and allowed 70. The next week it was 90 and 45. Last week it was 42 and 22. This week it was 28 and 27. That gap has closed in each of those weeks, and this week it nearly vanished.

Part of the reason is in net. Jonas Wagner played 4 games this week and saved 75.7%. Matteo Lehmann played 3 and saved 66.7%. Wagner had a meltdown in net in the loss to The cup knights. He had another in the 7-6 overtime loss. He made 16 saves on 23 shots in that game.

The net does not explain all of it. Three games had an unusually high shots-against count: The cup knights, Rink Roosters and the 7-6 overtime loss. In 6s, opponents average 13.1 shots against the Boogeymen. Rink Roosters got 20, and the overtime loss gave up 23. That is the signal worth tracking, because it is a defensive number and not a goaltending number.

Some of the week is noise. Two of the losses came in 3s, and they belong in a separate column. In 6s alone the Boogeymen won 2 of 5. The 7-6 overtime loss is the outlier of the week. The Boogeymen threw 85 hits to 15, an unusually high count. They also out-shot the opponent 31 to 23. Raz scored 3 goals and had 5 points. His 15 hits were a career high in 6s. Z Wang set 6s career highs with 2 goals and 4 points. Silky had a 6s career high of 22 hits. None of that saved a game in which 7 goals went in at the other end.

The milestones do not depend on the week's record. Joey Flopfish reached 100 goals this title. He also reached 300 points this title. Igor Orlov reached 300 points this title as well.

So the cold reading is this. The shot count is healthy, and the goals against are not. The AI goalies explain part of the gap, and the high shots-against counts point at the rest. A team that out-shoots opponents by that much should not finish a week with 28 goals for and 27 against. Until the shots against come back toward the norm, the record will keep telling a worse story than the shot count.

The Boogeymen out-shoot their opponents across the week again, but goals for and goals against stay closer together than the shot count says they should.