Boston Bruins: What’s changed with Charlie McAvoy’s game this season?

What’s changed with Charlie McAvoy’s game this season? Is it the Boston Bruins’ defense overall that is affecting him?

It’s fair to say that Boston Bruins fans were rejoicing a couple of seasons back when Charlie McAvoy first started showing signs of being a number one defenseman. Unfortunately for them, this season Charlie McAvoy has been lacking in a lot of areas. He hasn’t looked like the same elite player that the Boston Bruins thought they had.

Maybe we can chalk it up to a lot of angst this summer about his restricted free agency negotiations, maybe there’s something much greater at play.

The most telling statistic that sums up Charlie McAvoy right now is that he is sitting on zero goals for the year, 47 games in. While in the previous two seasons, he wasn’t an elite scorer or anything, he still managed seven across each campaign. 68 shots on net and not one has gone in.

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The next worst is David Savard of the Columbus Blue Jackets, who actually has an extra game on McAvoy and hasn’t managed a goal in 60 shots. Beyond those two though, we’re looking at players with at least 10 games less as the only others with 50 or more shots and no goals thus far this year.

At least he’s still managing to grab some assists; in that regard, he’s running at a pace relatively similar to previous seasons. During the 2017-18 campaign, he notched 10 primary and 15 secondary helpers and then 13 primary and 8 secondary in the 2018-19 campaign.

This year, he’s on pace to top his previous primary assists with 9 already and the 8 secondary should at least end up matching his best year. He’s also rocking a +10 plus/minus score at this point of the year; only Zdeno Chara and Brandon Carlo are doing better on the Boston Bruins’ blue-line.

The surprising thing is that looking beyond these blatant box-score statistics; he’s actually looking better in some measurements than he has in previous years. He’s running at a career-high for the numbers of icings the team gives up with him on the ice and equally a high for the number of icing calls going the Boston Bruins’ way, on offense.

Granted this could be adjudged as a team-specific statistic, however icings being given up are directly tied to the defense. His stat line of only giving up 1.29 on-ice icings for per game is a full 0.18 better than any previous year.

Given the amount of ice-time that he sees, Charlie McAvoy also impresses with his rate of just 1 giveaway per game, when averaged out. This isn’t his best when it comes to that specific stat-line, but equally the Boston Bruins’ nowadays use him much differently to his rookie campaign.

What is very clear is that the Boston Bruins have significantly increased the amount of defensive zone starts that Charlie McAvoy sees. In the whole of last season, he saw 121 starts in the defensive zone; this year, he’s already at 123; likewise his neutral zone starts – they’re up from last year’s 192 to 199 already.

Even more telling that this is a player that merely is suffering in box-car statistics but isn’t truly struggling out on the ice is that has already hit the same marker for takeaways this year as last year. This year, I might remind you, is still 32 games away from being over!

Could Charlie McAvoy be better out there; sure. But then the same can be said for large parts of the Boston Bruins roster this year.

Is a lack of goal-scoring painting a picture of a 22 year-old regressing significantly? Absolutely. Is it really the case? Not really, not when you look at the advanced statistics measuring his other on-ice impacts.

Soon enough, Charlie McAvoy will find the back of the net and all of this talk about him not being good enough will get swept under the rug. Yes, we wanted him to be a Norris Trophy contender this year, but fact is, he’s still a young man learning the NHL; his big-league career is only 164 games old!

Statistics courtesy of Evolving Hockey and NHL.com.