March has been a miserable month for NHL goalies

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March 2022 is shaping up to be the month where goaltending fell apart across the National Hockey League.

An interesting observation made this week on a precipitous decline in league-wide save percentage caught my eye. We’ve seen several clubs beaten down because of an inability to make a save in recent weeks – the Toronto Maple Leafs (86.7 stop rate), Minnesota Wild (85.9 stop rate), and Vegas Golden Knights (87.2 stop rate) are talented teams that have watched their goaltending capitulate in March.

If we look month-over-month performance, we see how effective shooters are at beating goaltenders right now. What’s interesting is that this is a complete reversal of a trend we normally see during regular seasons – scoring tends to be the highest early on, with teams playing looser defensively and officiating teams more inclined to call penalties.

This year, it’s the opposite: 

March has seen a pronounced move to the downside, with teams stopping 89.6 per cent of shots on average – a number you would expect from a journeyman backup goaltender over the course of a regular season.

Naturally, the first question we should explore is whether offensive pressure has materially changed. If goaltenders are facing a tougher profile of shots (be it higher volumes, better shot quality against, or a combination of the two), we would see a surge in expected goal scoring.

Here is what that looks like month-over-month: 

Two notable things stand out here. The first is that there has been divergence between rate-scoring and expected scoring at even strength for a couple of months. Because expected scoring is still flat, the inference is that shooters are simply more effective right now. We may not know if that is a byproduct