Tuukka Rask Analysis

Todays post is all about the Boston Bruins Superstar Goaltender: Tuukka Rask. As I’m sure a lot of you know, Tuukka led the Bruins to the Stanley Cup Final this summer and had a phenomenal playoff performance too. This was a fun post to make. Its something different than I’m used to, but I really enjoyed focusing on Tuukka Rask in particular. I have a feeling I’ll do this for other goalies and probably do some shot analysis too on specific players. Any suggestions?

Lets start out with this graphic:

The first thing you’ll see is a map of all the goals scored on Tuukka in the 2018-2019 season (all the graphics in this post are for the 2018-2019 season only). The colors represent the “event” that occurred before the goal was scored. This is mostly supplemental to give you some context on the goals.

To the right of the map is a “Success Per Event” table. This shows the percent breakdown of all prior events that lead to a goal on Tuukka last season. Not surprisingly, shots and face offs are the largest pieces here.

The graph on the bottom shows two things
1) the relative size of each last event on every shot, miss, or goal on Tuukka last season (taller bar = more of that event)
2) the goal success rate of each event category

You can see that shots and misses lead the categories with 9.58% and 8.30%, respectively, success rate. Something that sticks out to me is how low the Face Off success rate is (5.18%) – this speaks to Tuukka’s speed, reaction, and overall ability to stop pucks coming at him quick.

Now to my favorite graphic:

What I’ve done here is broke out every goal a team scored on Tuukka (including playoffs), categorized them by the last event (color) and the number of goals they scored on him (size) and found the average time (seconds) since the last event.

So, let’s look at St. Louis (STL) for a minute. The dark orange/brown circle is large because it represents a large number of goals they scored on Tuukka coming after a shot. It’s close to 0 because the goals came quickly after shots that occurred before the goal.

What’s interesting in the graphic are teams that dont have shots or misses closest to 0. The Arizona Coyotes for example scored the fastest on Tuukka when a hit occurred as the last event. Whereas Calgary took a long time to score after a missed shot.

To me this graphic speaks volumes about Rask as an elite goaltender, theres not one thing that is his weakness across all teams.

Data: www.moneypuck.com