On Mackenzie Blackwood's injuries and their impact

He has been a much different goaltender for the Devils when healthy.

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By CJ Turtoro (@CJTDevil)

Back when I was writing for All About the Jersey, we would always finish our season preview with a “predictions” post where all the writers would offer their take on how the year would go. One of the categories was what we thought the “X-factor” would be that season. 

In this category, I was the most boring blogger on the planet because basically every year I wrote “goaltending”. It seemed disingenuous to write anything else as the X-factor when that position has had the most value and most uncertainty for essentially the past decade.

Once again, as has been the case, seemingly since Martin Brodeur retired – and certainly since Cory Schneider’s performance fell off – the fate of the Devils season will be decided by goaltending. And, once again, as has been the case for the past three seasons, we expect about half of that load to fall on the shoulders of Mackenzie Blackwood. 

To management’s credit, they swung big each of the past two years. Corey Crawford was one of the best goalies of the 2010s so they nabbed him to split duties with Blackwood in 2020. When he retired in preseason, Mac was stuck manning the crease with Scott Wedgewood and Aaron Dell. Then we went at it again, grabbing Jon Bernier who had played 400 games across five different teams. He got injured as well leaving us Akirew Dalliewood.

So, this year, rather than swinging big for a respected veteran, Tom Fitzgerald decided to go with a younger, less-experienced goalie that wouldn’t get injured or retire in Vitek Vanecek.

It’s a move that should be seen as an endorsement of Blackwood since Vanacek doesn’t have the reputation of an every night starter. And this is no small commentary as many have soured on Blackwood, whose SV% has gone down – and GAA has gone up – every year of his below-average career.

Since we’re getting another season that will involve a substantial dose of Blackwood, let’s examine what his career has looked like thus far and if there’s reason for hope.

It’s not impossible to see why someone would really like Blackwood. Until very recently, I’d have counted myself among them. He’s had stretches where he looked like one of the best goalies alive. And, somehow, he’s actually above NHL .500 as a starter over his career (55-51-16) despite the Devils being one of the worst teams in the NHL over that stretch.

But COVID, injuries, and inexcusable overworking have caused him to really not have a fair shake at succeeding in a reasonable role.

What I wanted to do was try to separate his performance before and after suffering injuries to determine what a healthy Blackwood may have looked like.

Endeavors like this are rife with confirmation bias so I am leaving out speculation as to when he started to get overworked, or when the Hynes Devils started to “spiral”, or when his heel started bothering him even when he played through it. I’m only going with what’s official. 

I looked at NHL Injury Viz’s Database and recorded when he suffered each of his injuries. Then I tracked his performance in each season before and after each injury. Here were the results:

As you can see, his performance before suffering an injury is basically league-average (-0.06%), and in two of the three seasons, he was substantially above average. After suffering one injury, he’s in the red (-0.35%), but also probably still acceptable for a 1B goaltender in the NHL. For reference, that’s exactly what Vanecek’s career dSv% is.

Where it gets really ugly is after suffering multiple injuries (I counted his first COVID absence as an injury due to reported lasting symptoms). In total, he’s given up 18.67 goals over expected on just 1229 shots (about 30GP) in games in which he’d already suffered multiple injuries that season.

That’s compared to 9.49 goals over expected in 4202 shots (about 100GP) before suffering multiple injuries. That's the difference between giving up an additional goal in three out of every five games as opposed to just one every 10 games. 

Now, there’s something to be said for the best ability being availability. It’s possible Blackwood’s style of play is very hard on his body. Furthermore, we’ve seen multiple goalies struggle to shake off injury histories in the past and Blackwood certainly has one now. So, we can’t say for sure if Blackwood is going to be healthy. All we can say is how he historically played before and after injury. And the answer is clear: it’s two different guys.

Two of the bigger question marks in the fanbase entering this season were goaltending and coaching and it seems we’ve gotten a compromise on both variables. Fitzgerald dismissed the assistants and went out and got an NHL-caliber goaltender. But Ruff is still here, and Blackwood will still have a big role. 

It would seem that Fitzgerald is looking at data similar to what we’ve shown here, and he has enough faith in it that he’s willing to risk everything on a healthy Blackwood being a difference-maker for this team.

He’s decided that Mackenzie deserves a year where he’s not overworked or injured, and Lindy deserves a year with an NHL goalie.

It’s a reasonable bet to make that a healthy Blackwood will be enough to put us over the edge. Reasonable as it may be, it’s also very risky, because it may very well be the case that all three of their jobs depend on it.