Ilya Sorokin is facing an inordinate amount of shots this season.
The New York Islanders goaltender was peppered once again on Saturday evening in Sunrise, FL, turning away 42 of 45 shots in a 4-3 victory over the Panthers — his team’s stabilizing fifth win in its last seven games after an early seven-game losing streak.
But workload has been significant and borderline historic for the 28-year-old, whose numbers are understandably down following a 2022-23 season in which he finished second for the Vezina Trophy voting.
“If there’s one thing, I’d like to cut down the shot total a little bit,” Islanders head coach Lane Lambert said following Saturday’s win over the Panthers (h/t Islanders official site). “But there’s a tremendous amount of commitment and a tremendous amount of battle.”
Since facing just 14 shots in his second start of the season against the Arizona Coyotes on Oct. 17, Sorokin has faced 30 or more shots in each of his last 13 starts. Ten of those have featured more than 35 shots faced and five have seen him stare down 40 or more.
He’s often been left out to dry by a team that has had difficulties closing out games in the third period. While his save percentage has only gone down one-hundredth of a point (.924 to .914), his goals-against average has ballooned from 2.34 last year to 3.09.
There’s an obvious correlation in the danger that he’s faced. This year, he’s facing an average of 36.5 shots per game — 6.7 of them of the high-danger variety during 5-on-5 play. Last season, he faced 29.6 shots per game, a significant difference although it carried a similar 6.9 high-danger even-strength shots against.
“You can look at the shot total and go, ‘oh boy,’ but how many scoring chances do they really have?” Lambert said. “There are some nights where we want to be a little bit better in that area.”
His workload has been even greater over this 13-game span in which he’s seen an average of 38.9 shots per game. That’s a total of 506 shots against while he’s in the crease.
It’s the most shots faced by an Eastern Conference goaltender across a 13-game stretch since 2018 — the last just so happens to be an Islander, too, when Jaroslav Halak faced 503 from Jan. 1 to Feb. 8. This also makes Sorokin just the third Eastern Conference goalie since the start of the 1997-98 season to face more than 500 shots across a 13-start span, joining Halak and Brent Johnson of the Washington Capitals during the 2005-07 campaign.
Yet, almost remarkably enough despite Sorokin yielding an average of nearly 3.5 goals per game during this run — a figure that doesn’t quite reflect his play — the Islanders have taken at least a point in nine of those 13 games.
“I don’t think [shots on goal] is a number that we panic about but you want to limit shots, you want to limit opportunities,” defenseman Ryan Pulock told amNewYork last month. “I think sometimes scoring chances or high-danger chances is more of an indicator than actual shots because different teams throw pucks from everywhere. I think we just need to focus on limiting chances and if we’re giving up a shot from the outside, it’s an easy save for [Sorokin] and it’s not too taxing on him. Playing in our zone, though, we have to clean it up and just limit any sustained zone time.”
