Kessel? It’s more like trading away Malkin and leaving Syd’s line worse for the trade. Perry is every bit as good (and arguably better than Getzlaf) AND with more upside than Getzlaf in the coming years. I know trying to have TWO players with $66M over 8 would be taxing on the cap (but easier as time goes by), but it would be a wise move to sign him and keep or trade after the season. Whether Perry wants to do that…well, that’s could be a different topic. Also, with the Ducks in a serious hunt for the playoffs, trading Perry before the deadline would be disastrous for the great run they are having…I can’t see management making that option 1. I think Perry is enough of a team player enough to some shortened extension if it means keeping the team together for a cup run…but, I am probably being a little myopic here…so forgive me.
Would love to see a Kings/Ducks playoff series this season…hopefully it will happen this year…it seems both teams are playing with some serious purpose this year.
I don’t know and don’t deign to speak for the wisdom in trading the guy. I know I’d love to have him on my team, but I don’t follow the Ducks closely enough to know the details of his situation and whether or not it would be wise… but when someone asks how you could trade the guy, the rationale is there.
Not that the vast majority of fans would see it that way, but it’s there.
As for Detroit going to the East…Good Riddance…their fans over the years have been belligerent drunkards over the years whenever I’ve gone to a Duck/Wings or Kings/Wings game and had to deal with those lunkheads.
It makes total since to bring Winnepeg over to the West and send Columbus and Detroit to the East. We will still get to play them once a year and still collect their paychecks through beer sales.
I’m curious to see how Detroit going to the NE pans out. Detroit has regularly been tops in the league in fewest fighting majors for years and has long carried the banner against needing to stock a team with goons, and now they join a division with Boston, Toronto and Buffalo, who seem to all prescribe to the exact opposite theory of team building.
Since teams tend to build to win their division first and foremost, it’ll be interesting to see which theory comes out ahead at first and how that might alter the landscape of the division.
It shows how Anaheim, Toronto, Montreal, Carolina, Chicago and TB are all benefiting from some luck, though Chicago, Montreal and Carolina’s success are largely sustainable, whereas the other three would, over time, regress heavily.
The thing is, there is no timetable for regression, and the shortened season may not allow for things to straighten out as they normally would, so there’s hope yet for their fans.
I was honestly surprised to see that Ottawa wasn’t in that list of lucky teams. I guess our unsustainably good goaltending is being balanced by the complete lack of offensive talent.
PDO basically measures a team’s combined shooting and save percentage. In that sense Ottawa really ISN’T a lucky team. The Senators take more shots than any other team in hockey, but don’t score very often, so PDO says “hey, this team’s putting the puck on the net a lot and not scoring.”
The reflexive assumption here would be to say Ottawa takes a lot of low percentage shots, and so PDO means nothing. To be honest, though, that
A) isn’t really the way ot looks to me, subjectively speaking,
B) Teams that take a lot of shots generally do score a lot of goals. Of the top 10 teams in shots, most are above average in goals, and only two, Ottawa and San Jose, are substantially below average, and
C) Ottawa’s shooting percentage is amazingly low. While they lack high profile scorers, no NHL team can be this bad at shooting.
Of course, all this means very little when you consider that PDO measures the 2013 Ottawa Senators. The CURRENT version of the team, the one that lacks Erik Karlsson, is a different squad.
I wish my Pens would stop coming back so late in the game. My nerves can’t take it.
(Although it really cracked me up, when after the game they referred to Brandon Sutter as “Brent” – it was even on the caption screen. Uh, Brent’s his father.)
Yeah, the B’s were pretty terrible for the last 40-45 minutes of that game. Khudobin was doing his best but it was only a matter of time. I’d say I’m looking forward to the rematch on Sunday, but that’s also a road game as the second half of a back to back.
Just so. They’re simultaneously getting very lucky and very unlucky, which is balancing out for the now.
Hard to say what effect not having Karlsson will have on the +50% Fenwick/Close, though I think most people could probably take an educated guess, but if that starts to fade and the goal tending starts to slip before the shooting starts to correct itself, it’ll be a quick fall.
They’re leading the league in shots per game, and they’re 29th in shots against per game. If they had an average shooting percentage they’d be scoring ~2.97 goals per game, which would bump them from 27th to 9th in the league. If they were getting roughly average goal tending they’d be giving up 3.03 goals per game, which would drop them from 1st in the league all the way to 25th.
It may not this shortened season at all. shrug It’s a cautionary tale, however. Minnesota and Toronto last year, Colorado the year before, and so on, all thought they’d stumbled onto some secret formula for success, but eventually their luck all ran out and the better teams surpassed them and they sunk back to their more rightful places in the standings.
As an aside, total shot counts can be misleading as they don’t take special teams or score effects into consideration. If Anaheim went up early, it would be almost expected that they’d be outshot throughout the game.
Actually the Ducks were down 1-0 for much of the game, yet only had 3 shots in the first period and 4 in the second. If you want to call that luck… well, I would have to 100% agree with you. Perry was tossed for a late hit (a 5 minute major which today was turned into a 4 game suspension) and they looked lost for much of the game; but in the third period they turned it all around and came out winners again.
I tend to find the Fenwick stuff fairly bogus, but I can’t argue that they seem to have been pretty darn lucky at times this season. I’ll take it.
Well if you want a long-winded discussion about it from a Ducks fan’s perspective, here’s a long thread on the subject over at Battle of California. The short version to me though is that shots just isn’t that great a stat. Yes, shooting more is better than shooting less, but a shot in hockey isn’t the same thing as a hit in baseball or a rushing yard in football. It doesn’t tell enough of the story - a hard slap shot with traffic in front isn’t the same as flipping one on net from a bad angle. And beyond that, a weak wrister from the blue line counts, but a one-timer from 8 feet out that rings off the crossbar doesn’t - cause that doesn’t count as a shot.
Anyway, there obviously IS a correlation, but it’s pretty far away from hard science. And as has been pointed out already, in this short season, even if there IS a regression to the mean, it may not happen til next year.
That’s not much of a discussion about it that I could see, that’s a group of fans fighting to rationalize why their team will defy the odds.
The Wild fans did it last year too and became quite the punchline on SBN sites when their inevitable slide came.
Anyway, I’m not here to argue the case for advanced metrics as some kind of perfect predictor or to shit on Ducks fan’s optimism, I was just curious as to the genesis of your statement.
If you’re interested, however, there are a lot of guys doing very good work, some of which is linked to in that thread, that show pretty conclusively that shot quality effects are minimal.
Also, just wanted to clear something up: a one timer off the post does count in Corsi and Fenwick because they count all events, even misses (except Fenwick, which doesn’t count blocks).
Basically. That’s how the official shot counters count them, anyway, yes. If the goalie is out of position and someone else manages to make the save instead, that still counts, but the gist of it is that someone has to actually physically stop the puck from going into the net for it to be counted as a shot.
Always thought that was silly, as hitting the pipe is about as close as you can get to scoring without actually scoring, but the powers that be seem to feel the opposite; that hitting the post is closer to missing than hitting.
There are similar problems in any statistic. A batter who hits a ground ball to the shortstop but reaches base when the shortstop skips the throw past the first baseman is actually counted as having made an out, and his batting average goes down, despite the fact that no out ever happened. So in fact, virtually all everyday baseball players are assigned multiple outs that did not happen. Conversely, a player who hits a single, tries to extend it into a double, an d is thrown out at second by thirty feet because he’s a doofus is credited with a hit, even though he effectively did nothing at all.
These new methods of studying hockey are, well, new. (I’ll call them Gretzkymetrics, 'cause why not?) Like sabermetrics, Gretzkymetrics need some time to flesh stuff out and see if the hypotheses hold up over multiple seasons.
But I wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand just because some stats aren’t perfect. NO stats are perfect, but it was 25 years ago that Bill James and the early pioneers of sabermetrics had already conclusively demonstrated a bunch of things that people hadn’t known before but know now; there are no clutch hitters, pitchers who don’t strike people out don’t last, on base percentage is the most important thing there is, it’s more important for a fielder to have a lot of range than avoid errors, etc. etc.
The theory that shot differential and possession are the core predictive stats of hockey seems logical to me. Time will tell, as the stats are refined, just how true that is.
RickJay, I agree with you entirely, and I think you stated my position better than I did myself. Basically, I’m just not ready to go all-in with Corsi or Fenwick because I haven’t yet been convinced by them. Sabermetrics may be relatively new, but baseball has been living off of statistics for 100 years. Baseball IS statistics. Hockey, it seems to me, is simply inherently less well suited to stats than other sports; which, if true, would also mean that it’s less well suited to metrics as well.
I’m not a 70 year old scout shaking his fist at these young kids and their new-fangled computing machines, I’m just not totally on board yet when it comes to hockey.
