With the Hungry Jack’s 2024 AIHL Finals just around the corner, Hockey Hype Australia is taking a look at how each of the teams competing got there, and what the keys to their success are. Today we have the return of the Melbourne Ice to Finals after seven years and four seasons away.

2024 Record

Overall record (18 W – 2 OTW – 3 OTL – 7 L) (0.678* PCT -before point deduction)

• Record against finals-bound teams (9 W – 1 OTW – 2 OTL – 4 L)

Story of the season:  Leapt out of the blocks in 2024, but player availability and discipline issues hampered them through the middle. Are they coming back to form at the right time?

Key stats

Figure 1: Melbourne Ice Percentage – overall, and against Finals-bound teams.

The Ice are the only team in the AIHL with a higher percentage against finals-bound teams than overall. It isn’t by a lot, but it is impressive.

Figure 2: Melbourne Ice goal scoring – versus league average, overall and against finalists.

The key to the Ice’s strong performance against finals-bound teams has been defence, keeping them to only 3.3 goals per game. Below shows how key special teams has been for the Ice against finalists – with both the PP and PK performing better against the strongest teams.

Figure 3: Melbourne Ice special teams performance.

Strengths

PDO – League-leading PDO (save percentage plus shooting percentage). This is a measure of how effective a team is around the net, at both ends of the ice. Here it suggests the Ice have strong goaltending (which Ishida has seen to), and are efficient when shooting. This has been key to taking their chances.

Goaltending – to narrow down on goaltending, Tatsu Ishida has been huge for the Ice with incredible positional play. He leads all starting goalies over the season for save percentage (0.921). Over the Ice’s past 10 games, this has still been good, but not quite to the same high standards of earlier in the season – which would have been hard.

Home games – The Ice’s home record is considerably stronger than their away record (PCT of 0.822 vs 0.533) – and with home ice advantage and last change for the start of Finals, this could be important.

Weaknesses

Discipline – The Ice have one of the worst PIM differentials in the league, taking 1.9 PIM per game more than their opponents, and 16.8 PIM themselves – top of the league.

Scoring spread – the second-largest reliance on top-line scoring of the finals teams, with 56.3% of points over the past 10 games coming from Albrecht, Caruana and Kraemer. This is lower than only the Lightning across the AIHL.

When they win

Goaltending huge (averages 0.940 in wins, 0.846 in losses), shots against are kept low (averages 32.25 in wins vs 39.0 in losses), PK is strong (89.3% in wins vs 74.6% in losses).

Player to watch

Joey Hughes. It’s AIHL Finals, it’s Joey Hughes. Enough said.

Under the radar: Ellesse Carini has been building an impressive first season with the Ice, putting up over a point per game across 19 games.  

Weird stat

The Ice powerplay performs incredibly well on the second day of a double-header weekend. Overall the PP scores on 21.2% of chances, but on the second day of a double-header, this jumps to 30.0%. Handy trait to have going into a weekend where they need 3 wins in 3 days.

Top 10 scorers

Goalies

Projected lineup