What Can We Learn by Looking at Natalie Spooner’s Historic Season?
Is Natalie Spooner just an incredibly gifted goal scorer whose shot can’t be replicated, or did she just have a very lucky season?
The season is about to begin for all six PWHL teams and it’s the time for coaches to implement systems, strategy, play style, etc. that they came up with during the summer. They didn’t come up with this alone though. The best coaches work with their assistants, the general manager, and the other support staff available to them, such as the analytics department, to take the lessons from the season that just finished then apply them to being better for the next season. This isn’t anything groundbreaking that teams try, or should try, to learn from the past to be better ready for the future.
I don’t have access to any team’s to-do list of what they want to improve upon over the off-season, but when the league average save percentage (SV%) ends up at a 0.921 and the playoffs were essentially trench warfare, we can make an educated guess that teams want to figure out how to score more. Now these PWHL teams, while lacking a staff like an NHL team would, still have more people than me to figure this scoring problem out. They’re able to spend a lot more time pouring over game tape and advanced analytics than I can, but I also want to find a way to increase scoring. Yes, the goalie person likes goals, sue me.
So, if I can’t go over the hundreds of goals scored in the PWHL inaugural season, what am I going to do? Well, why don’t we look at the season Natalie Spooner had and see if anything can be replicated which is what coaches want, a player who can score goals at a ~0.83 goals per game pace? There are two factors we need to sort first though before embarking upon this journey. Is Natalie Spooner just an incredibly gifted goal scorer whose shot can’t be replicated or did she just have a very lucky season?
