Red Wings Player Grades: Petr Mrazek

Player Profile

Born: Ostrava, CZE 14 February 1992

Height/Weight: 6’2” / 183

Position: Goalie

Stats

GP : 50

GS (games started): 44

W/L/OT: 18/21/9

adjGSAA: 1.71

LD/MD/HD SV%: 97.92/91.4/81.5

Season Narrative

Over the summer, the Red Wings and Petr Mrazek agreed on a 2 year, 4M AAV contract that will see him still be an RFA when it expires. The expectations were that he would build on last year’s season, and hopefully become more consistent. I’m going to use a few SAVE charts from Ian Fleming, which are helpful visual compilations to look at goalies and compare their performance to other goalies. The comparison on the left is to goalies that were 1-2% of the team’s cap. Since Mrazek was making $737,500 last year that’s where he falls.

Ian Fleming

You can see that last year, Mrazek outperformed his peer group across the board, and was above league average in every category measured. There was good reason to believe that he would do better this year.

The AAA% stat (shown as AxA% on some SAVE charts) is his percentage of appearances above average. This is the percentage of appearances in which the actual number of goals against is lower than than the expected number of goals against.

What He Did vs. Expectation

Mrazek was inconsistent this season, to put it mildly. If it wasn’t for the excellent play of Jimmy Howard (when he wasn’t hurt), the Wings would have been eliminated from the playoffs far sooner.

Even though Mrazek continued to enjoy his advantage over Howard in the team’s offense while he was on the ice, he was not able to translate that support into wins nearly as often as the team needed him to.

Of course remember that this year’s Red Wings team did not provide much offensive support, he still consistently received more than Howard did. (5v5 GF60 was 1.65 for Howard and 2.24 for Mrazek.)

Here is the SAVE comparison between Mrazek and Howard this year.

Ian Fleming

The bars start in the middle and go out in both cases, so for Howard, you want to see his bars extend more to the left, and for Mrazek, you want to see his extend more to the right.

Since anyone watching the team this year could tell you that both goalies faced a distressingly high number of high danger shots. I wanted to take a look if the stats matched the eye test, so I looked up the High Danger Shots per 60 minutes for the 29 goalies other than Mrazek who had the most 5v5 TOI this year.

I chose those 29 because Mrazek started the most games for the Red Wings this season, and I figured that was a relatively quick way to compare him to an NHL #1 goalie.

The average of those 29 goalies was 6.7 HD shots/60 faced. Mrazek faced 7.43, or 11% more than his peer group.

Remember, this statistic is a reflection of the defense in front of the goalie, not the goalie himself.

Mrazek rated right about league average in HDSV%, but with more HD shots against than the average, he let in more goals on those chances.

The most obvious negative stat on Mrazek’s SAVE chart is the medium danger save % (91.29). This stat lines up with the eye test because many of the goals Mrazek let in this year were goals that were not very dangerous scoring chances.

Final Grade: D

While the team in front of him did not play well, Mrazek’s performance this year was a contributing factor to the team’s poor showing. He showed promise of the goalie we were hoping to see down the stretch. Strangely, he performed better after his birthday (February 14) this year than he did before. Perhaps he really hated being 24.

I think he definitely performed below expectations, but I grade him a little above an F. He’s still the clear consensus to protect in the expansion draft for the goalie position among our editorial staff, and I think that an F wouldn’t reflect that.

For my final chart, here is a comparison of his last three seasons with goalies making 4-5M AAV (his current salary bracket). He still stacks up well in that comparison. Just to be clear, I’m not using this for this season’s grade, but I think it’s a good visual to show that there’s good reason to think Mrazek could bounce back next year.

Ian Fleming