It’s gonna come as a big surprise to you, but the reason the Florida Panthers struggled isn’t because they went with an analytics-first philosophy.

The decision to fire Gerard Gallant was an understandable one at the time — he basically complained to the media about the team’s roster construction, which will get you canned from a lot of jobs — but it didn’t work out in the long term. Now that they’re about to hire a new coach for the third time since 2014, and Dale Tallon is the GM again for some reason, apparently it’s time for a referendum on how the Computer Boys Era went.

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The shocking take from the old guys in the hockey media is that analytics didn’t work. The shocking reality is that a bunch of factors came together to really hurt their performance in a number of different ways, not the least of which was that Tom Rowe ended up being worse at coaching than Gallant.

Not to say Gallant was a genius or anything (he was perfectly adequate) but the team felt like it wanted to take the next step after investing heavily in solid player acquisitions this summer. Rowe’s work didn’t allow them to do that, nor did all those other factors, so here we are at another crossroads, and another season without the playoffs.

The most important thing for the Panthers in terms of overall success, or lack thereof, is obviously the way in which percentages swung for them over the past three years.

Pretty simple: They shot 7.9 percent in 2014-15, when they finished with 91 points. Then they shot 9.8 percent last year. This year they shot 7.8 percent.

And in 2014-15, their goalies stopped .915, which rose to .921 last year, then fell back to .915 this year.

It’s not always easy to explain why shooting percentages come and go — though I’ll talk about that in a minute — but the goaltending issue is easy to diagnose. Two seasons ago, Roberto Luongo was great (.921) but his backups were terrible. Last year, both Luongo and Al Montoya had phenomenal seasons (.922 and .919). Then this year, Luongo took a step back (.915), which happens sometimes when you’re 37, while James Reimer remained good (.920), and Reto Berro was horrible in seven appearances games (.876, and he picked up a loss in five of them).

It should be said that .915 is still a little above the league average, but .920 as a unit is really hard to do without one goalie getting up into the .930s or so. To illustrate the difference, let’s say the Panthers only got .915 goaltending last season; that costs them 15 goals and about five points in the standings. Think anyone is flipping out about a 99-point Florida team?

Hitting 100 is a big deal to people. It signifies something in a way that even 99-point seasons do not. It’s silly but it’s true.

As for shooting percentage, well, there were a lot of factors at play there, as you might imagine. But to open the discussion, note that just about every big-minutes player from last year’s team saw at least some decline in their shooting percentage this season. Jagr, huge hit. Barkov, smaller hit. Huberdeau about the same, but he missed a ton of games, and whoever they used to replace him just couldn’t measure up.

The Jagr-Barkov-Huberdeau line was of course the big goalscoring engine for Florida last season. They spent more than 602 minutes at 5-on-5 together, and scored more than two-thirds of all the goals they got on the ice. They were able to generate tons of scoring chances by working together in a unique way, and just pounded opponents. Did they get lucky during that campaign? You bet they did; in terms of expected-goals, they “should have” scored about 28.5 goals together. They actually scored 36. Huge difference.

Story continues