Sjöberg in Relief for Bending-Sörling - How Did He Do?

In the dramatic SSL game between Falun and Storvreta, Falun's goalkeeper Carl Bending-Sörling had to leave the game in the 35th minute, with an apparent injury. Enter Philip Sjöberg – a highly touted young floorball goalie.

And talk about getting thrown into the fire. He makes a save on a powerplay shot from Ulriksson with his first action, and after that he has to pick up the ball from his own net on the next two shots. A top corner powerplay shot from Filip Eriksson and a tricky breakaway shot on a bouncing ball from Otto Weidman.

In the end though – he had presented himsel as a guy with a flair for the dramatics. A big save on an Ulriksson breakaway with less than a minute away, which just seconds later led to the equalizer from Emil Johansson. And in the penalty shootout, he saved six of nine penalty shots from the heaviest guns in Storvreta (Kohonen, Eriksson and Ulriksson).

Though Storvreta won the game in the end in that penaly shootout, a lot of the talk afterwards was centered around Sjöberg and his big saves in the end.

But how did he do in the actual game?

You guys know that I am not a big fan of save percentage as a factor to analyze goalie performance. Today, I want to highlight two other ways of reviewing the performance he had, after coming in in the 35th minute of this high-octane game between the two Swedish giants.

Let us start by looking at some raw numbers from Sjöberg's performance.

The 5-on-5 performance

He faced 8 shots on net, and conceded 3 goals, which would put him at a 63% save percentage. Well below the average for men's SSL of around 76-77% depending on which season you look at. So if we would only look at that, he would be considered to have had a below average performance with a pretty big margain.

Now, the disadvantages of using save percentage (alone) to review goalie performance are pretty obvious. A save on a mediocre shot from the middle line will be equally valued as a breakaway save.

Let us take it another step, and check the xG values of each shot on target that he faced, to get a feeling for the defensive environment he got exposed to. Meaning that a big scoring chance will be weighted way heavier than a random shot from the middle line. And then you compare the total xG value of all shots on net, to the number of goals he conceded. That is what is called Goals Saved Above Expected (GSAx) – certainly a better way of judging Sjöberg's performance. However, also with this metric in mind, he seems to have had a sub-par performance. His GSAx value is -0,61, meaning that he saved around half a goal less than he should have, during his minutes on court, when taking the quality of the shots he faced into account.

Now, there is a potential weekness to GSAx as well, since it only tracks the shots that hit the target. There is a big push in the goalie community to use Fenwick / Unblocked GSAx instead. That type of model counts a shot that missed the target as a save for the goalie. The reasoning being, that a goalie that plays the position well, he or she forces the shooter to aim closer to the posts and the crossbar, therefor sometimes missing the net because of the work the goalie put in.

I tracked all Storvreta shots from this game that missed the net, and gave Sjöberg credit for some of them – when I thought his positioning was a big reason for the shot missing the net.

Have a look at the results for Fenwick GSAx – Sjöberg actually hits the mark here, and even exceeds it by 0,04 saved goals. Meaning, if you take the glass half full perspective of Fenwick GSAx – he performed up to standards! 🥛

The penalty shootout performance

In the last years of men's SSL, goalies would save around 40 to 45% of all penalty shots, with small variations from year to year.

Sjöberg saved 6 out of 9 (67%), which would mean that he overperformed by a lot! And we will look into how he did it in a video below. He kept Falun in the penalty shootout for a long time, but eventually Storvreta won the game in the ninth round.

Let us check some game tape, to see what we can take out of Sjöberg's performance from a tactical standpoint. Beginning with his five-on-five play. 👇