Beyond the save percentage: Mikhail Yegorov's search for the full picture

For Mikhail Yegorov, it’s all about understanding the bigger picture. 

Whether that’s within a single game, a season, or even a whole career, the Boston University goalie and New Jersey Devils prospect wants to be able to better tell the story of how well he’s done stopping pucks. 

Yegorov also wants that story to be publicly available, which is why he launched his own website, YegorovStats.com, to take a deeper, public look at his performance. 

“I kind of wanted to create the full picture of the game, and I didn’t want to waste an opportunity early, now, to be able to build that maybe for my full career,” Yegorov said. “So maybe if, say I play potentially for 20 years, I can break all of that down, [and] have the data. Maybe it’s something someone else can use to study goaltending, too.”

The site itself looks at Yegorov’s stats on a game-by-game basis, while also looking at more specific situations. For example, he keeps track of shots based on grades, A+ through C, while also tracking more specific rebound control and how well he plays the puck after making an initial save. 

The site is a public disclosure of the dashboard Yegorov has used himself since his freshman year at Boston University, while working with then-BU goalie coach Brian Daccord, the director of goaltending for the Detroit Red Wings, and now current Terriers goalie coach Cam Doomany. 

The data is scraped from both in-house metrics, which Doomany tracks during games, and NCAA box scores. Yegorov then uploads and cross-tracks the data himself before publishing it to the website. 

“I think it’s been a really good tool for me to look at rolling windows, five to ten games, and see how and what a goalie was good at,” Yegorov said. “Like last season there were a couple times I saw I dipped in the second half of a 10-game window, so I worked on that with my goalie coach, a mental coach, and bounced back. But sometimes you don’t even realize you dipped without having that data.”

Another example Yegorov gave is how he’s used period-by-period and home-and-away breakdowns of his game from last season to go into this season. He’s looked at that data, he said, and wants to have a better understanding in his training of how to better start games, since his play was notably better in the second and third periods. 

“You kind of look at things like this, and you learn about what’s really happening in the game, [and] how you really performed,” Yegorov said. “Like there was a game last year that I felt down about, Quinnipiac last November. I let up six goals, but when you look at the numbers deeper and the full picture, I didn’t play as poorly, and that helps you.”

On the flip side, Yegorov said sometimes the data can paint a rougher picture, and part of this public disclosure is being open to that and using it to improve. 

“We’re not in baseball where statistics are super clean, and you can do ‘Moneyball’ for everything, but it’s about understanding and combining that,” Yegorov said. “In building this website, in looking through it, I kind of was able to let go of some of the things that brought me down about last season, when I didn’t do as well as many people, myself included, anticipated. I kind of was able to look at the truth of everything, and work from that.”

It’s about combining the data with actionable performance, but it’s also a genuine curiosity for Yegorov to better understand the position in totality. 

“That’s part of it. I want to be able to have tools like this to understand it, to understand those rolling windows better,” Yegorov said. “And hopefully other goalies are more open about it too. You learn more that way, and maybe you get [a] better picture of what is and isn’t the best way to judge goalies.”