What's Wrong With Jack Campbell?
A deep dive into what's plaguing the Oilers' netminder
Right from the start, I was extremely concerned with the bet the Oilers were making on Jack Campbell. Before the Oilers had signed him, I penned this article highlighting the numerous red flags that Campbell presented. Beyond what was included there, Kevin Woodley from InGoal Magazine shared that not only were Campbell’s adjusted numbers ranking in the 30s league-wide in both the 19-20 and 20-21 seasons but Campbell’s strengths and weaknesses did not line up well behind the Oilers’ defensive environment (via ClearSightAnalytics).
Ken Holland proceeded to give Campbell a 5 x 5M contract, and what had started out as hype around the netminder ballooned into massive expectations with the new contract, with some mainstream media going as far as picking him to be the Vezina winner. During my pre-season predictions appearance on the SuperFan Podcast, I restated my concern in what was a huge contrarian take at the time, particularly during what appeared to be a decent preseason campaign.
We’re now 10 starts into Campbell’s Oilers career and it’s gone worse than even his greatest skeptics could have imagined. The 30-year-old currently sports a .873 sv%, -1.82 dFSv% (adjusted save percentage based on Fenwick events), and -7.81 GSAx so far this season per EvolvingHockey. He’s had goal support, which has allowed him to hold a 6-4-0 record, but things are dire to say the least.
Mike McKenna of DailyFaceoff wrote an article breaking down what he was seeing. The four main points he emphasized were Campbell’s struggles with his alignment, traffic, patience, equipment, and confidence. He’s spot on with these observations, but I believe that the underlying issues run a little deeper, and are therefore causing havoc on multiple aspects of his game.
Underlying Issue #1: Tracking
On Wednesday’s OilersNow Segment with Mark Spector, Bob Stauffer mentioned a concept called Head Trajectory (also referred to or used in conjunction with box control). At NHL speeds, the puck has to travel in straight lines to enter the net. Head Trajectory utilizes biomechanics to optimize body position to protect the most net possible. Simplified, when a goaltender’s head comes down “over” the puck, it becomes more natural for the goalie to react in straight lines in front of their body, which cuts down the angle as shown in the diagram below. In order to do this properly, the goalie needs to be able to read the release, have a quick reaction time, and be seeing the puck off this stick.
Plain and simple, Jack Campbell is not tracking the puck very well right now. The goals against Dallas and Carolina linked below show his head pulling off the puck, which results in him chasing the puck with his gloves over his pads, which in effect opens up a window for the puck to go in.
Underlying Issue #2: Stance
Unlike tracking, a poor stance can’t single-handedly cause goals. However, Campbell’s naturally wide stance is causing issues in other parts of his game. Campbell’s stance typically has his feet set wide, as in the picture below where his skates are set outside his shoulders.
The other issue with how Campbell is setting up is his chest angle. With his feet wide and with a knee bend, he’s already set pretty low (which is less of an issue than you might think if his tracking is executed properly due to the vertical attack angles). However, to compensate, Campbel’s chest has been falling back as he drops to the ice, as shown below.
Resulting Issue #1: Cross-Ice Movements
A common defence of Jack Campbell so far is that his defence has left him out to dry. While the defence has definitely regressed compared to last year’s team under Woodcroft (See @NHL_Sid’s work on this), Campbell is not helping his own cause with his cross-crease movements, often making the chances seem harder than they are. There are two issues happening with Campbell’s movement and both are coming during the initial rotation phase of his push.
The first scenario happens because of Campbell’s stance. He will be set square to the initial puck carrier but as mentioned above, his feet will get too wide as he gets deeper into his stance. When the change of angle of occurs, Campbell is locked into the initial angle with his feet. This means that he’s unable to move without first bringing his lead leg back into his body before he can rotate and push to the new angle. The other thing that causes this extra movement is the way Campbell tracks the puck through the rotation. When a goalie’s head comes over around his shoulder when he’s tracking the puck to the next location, the whole body naturally turns along with it, eliminating additional time and movement needed to square up the rest of his body. Campbell has been susceptible to coming over top of his shoulder, which separates the body into different sections that independently need to rotate. This extra delay means he’s left chasing the pass, and as a result, it looks like he has no chance as he’s chasing his position.
The other scenario when Campbell is locked in before a pass is that he comes across flat. Ideally a goalie is going to be taking direct routes to the next angle, which would need a rotation before actually pushing across. There’s been multiple where instead of rotating, Campbell pushes off perpendicular to his original angle, meaning that he’s not maximizing the net he covers as he moves over.
Resulting Issue #2: Patience
Like McKenna said, Campbell’s patience has been an area of concern to this season. He focused on 36’s tendency to slide to where he thinks the puck is going when he loses sight, but I think there’s also a more technical reason this is happening.
Campbell hasn’t been seeing the puck well off of sticks so it’s causing him to guess on what’s going to happen so he can react more quickly. However, when the player is attacking and Campbell gets wide and deep in his stance, there’s really no place for him to go but down. As a result, he gets frozen by players with a back door option, taking himself out of the play before the shot is even released. If Campbell was playing with more confidence in his reads and ability to track the puck, we’d likely see him be more patient on his edges, allowing him to be more agile in these situations.
Resulting Issue #3: Rebounds
It’s been pretty well documented that Campbell’s struggled with his rebound control so far. Evaluating goals off of rebounds can be tough because the second chance itself is frequently high danger, but the creation of itself is partially attributed to the goalie.
Campbell has given up numerous goals off rebounds so far this season. Here are some of the more notable examples below, or you can look at a full list here.
In these goals, there’s really two different trends happening. The first is with shots to the chest spraying out for second chance opportunities. Theoretically, these should be some of the easiest shots to freeze but because he’s so deep and wide in his stance, his chest has to straighten up as he drops. For a goalie that’s already not seeing the puck great, this pulls his head and body further away from the puck trajectory, which makes it harder from him to track the puck into his body and cradle with his arms for the freeze.
The other thing that happens is that Campbell has a tendency to kick at pucks towards the low corners, which punts the puck towards the middle. This is particuarly problematic as the softer Vaughn pads that Campbell uses allows the puck to stay closer to the net where it would be in more dangerous areas. One potential solution is for Campbell to work on reacting by sliding his pad out from his knee, which maintains the angle of the pad in the butterfly which should direct the puck towards the corner.
By any metric or standard, Jack Campbell has not had a good start to his Oiler career. These struggles aren’t completely unprecented based on Campbell’s history, but they are rooted in some key technical components of his game. Campbell’s struggles with tracking and his current stance have been causing extra goals against by impacting his ability to move cross-crease, control rebounds and be patient. Luckily for the Oilers, Stuart Skinner is playing great hockey to date which will give Campbell a chance to work in practice to fix some of the issues plaguing his game.
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