Everything Else

Angry At Numbers: Danger Danger….Actually, it’s Only Middling Voltage

By Sam Fels 2158 0

As I was writing up Pekka Rinne’s spotlight yesterday, and noticing the spike in his high-danger save-percentage, I got to thinking. And friends, you know what happens when I get to thinking. Because as I dug around, I saw that a lot of goalies were seeing a jump in their high-danger save percentages at even-strength. Was this a league-wide trend? Turns out it is.

I charted the high-dangers SV% of all starting goalies starting in the 2009-2009 season, and averaged them for a league-wide figure. Here’s what I got:

As you can see, from last season to this, there’s been an 11-point jump. It’s the biggest jump in any season, and by something of a margin. The only other one is the 2012 to 2013 jump of eight points, and some of that could be explained by the season-in-a-can and shooters out of rhythm and such. There was a seven-point jump in the year before that as well.

The NHL will point to a spike in scoring, as each team is averaging 2.93 goals per game this year versus 2.77 goals per game last year. Though that seems to have more to do with a spike in power play goals, which has jumped to 0.63 per game for team over last year’s 0.57. Though not all, as even-strength goals per team are slightly up from last year, 1.84 from 1.81 per game.

One reason that might be is that teams are creating more high-danger chances this year, and there’s been something of a spike. Over the past four years, the average number of high-danger chances every team creates per 60 has gone from 10.1, to 10.2, to 10.3, to 10.7 this year. So while goalies are saving more chances that are considered the best, they’re also facing more.

The reasons for this could be many, but I can’t help but think of expansion and years of a flattening cap. Basically, goalies are facing teams that only have two or three prime finishers instead of four or five that teams might have had back in the day. At the same time, you have worse players on each team, making more mistakes, with more defenders who can’t stem the tide before it gets to the crease.  That’s just a theory.

What we have known for a while is that goalies get better every year. Overall save-percentages have climbed basically every year of your life. So maybe high-danger chances just come along with it. This seems to be a particular spike, though. Food for thought.

Everything Else

Game #50 – Hawks vs. Predators Preview/Garden Party: As We Live A Life Of Ease

By Sam Fels 2186 0

 vs. 

RECORDS: Hawks 23-19-7   Predators 29-11-7

PUCK DROP: 7pm

TV: NBCSN Nationally, NBSCN Chicago locally

MANY MORE OF THEM LIVE NEXT DOOR: On The Forecheck

When you biff what should be the easier part of your schedule, that means you have to get it done against the harder part of the schedule. But hey, why not go for degree of difficulty when you’ve got nothing else to lose? The Hawks begin a pretty tricky stretch of the campaign tonight, with their post-All Star break slate taking them to the West’s best team (yes they are, fuck off Vegas) before heading back out West which didn’t go so well last time. And if the Hawks have any designs on making something of this season, they don’t get any mulligans anymore.

And this is probably not the time to be catching the Predators, even if this comes one game early for Filip Forsberg’s return (not that he regularly torches the Hawks or anything). They’ve won seven of the last eight, and the only loss in that time was losing a game of pitch and toss to the Lightning. So yeah, they haven’t been beaten in regulation since January 2nd. They just got done thwacking the Devils in New Jersey before the break when they barely cared. If you’re looking for a silver lining, and you’ll have to dig, these wins haven’t exactly come against world beaters. The Yotes twice, the Kings, the Oilers, and the Panthers are the trophies on the wall for the month of January. Fuck, even the Hawks beat the Oilers twice.

While the Preds only sit one point back of the Jets and have three games in hand on them and are thus poised to show them a clean pair of heels right quick, there are cracks in the foundation underneath this team. While usually a staple of Peter Laviolette team, this team metrically is not very impressive. They’re exactly a dead-even possession team at 50 CF%, and they actually give up way better chances than they create with a pretty paltry 47.7 xGF% as a team. If you go by scoring chance and high-danger scoring chance percentages, they’re in the bottom third of the league in those as well.

Some of this can be attributed to Ryan Ellis only having played the last couple weeks, but that can’t explain it all. As good as Ellis is in both ends of the ice, one player is not making this up or at fault. The Preds don’t create as many chances per game as you’d assume they do given their speed and depth. Pekka Rinne has had to pull their ass out of a sling pretty often, and when he hasn’t Juuse Saros mostly has. That’s who the Hawks will get tonight as Rinne is preserved for a couple more days after the break.

The Preds lack of punch could be a matter of just pacing until the spring. It could be that Ryan Johansen has looked like the over-fed pile of earlobes that he did at times in Ohio and not the dynamo who’d eat your heart last spring. Totally not a coincidence that he signed a new contract that pays him $8 mildo until the sun swallows us all this summer, then.

The Preds have been picked up by their depth though, with Fiala, Smith, and Jarnkrok all scoring more than 10 goals off the top line. And as they do, they pour goals and points in from the back end, with PK Subban leading them in scoring and Josi and Ekholm both having more than 20 points as well. The return of Ellis only exacerbates this, and though Josi and Ellis are playing together at the moment Lavvy always has the option of splitting them up and having scoring threats on all three pairings. They’re about the only team in the league that can threaten that.

For the Hawks, there don’t appear to be any changes from last Thursday’s demolition of the Red Wings, and nor should there be. We want to see Top Cat get more chances to play with actual talent, and if anyone is going to wake up Brandon Saad it’s Patrick Kane. The third line is still something of a jumble but the 4th line is definitely more interesting as a speedy Pollock painting than whatever it was Wingels and Bouma did (though Wingels is still ahead of Sharp on the third line, which is fine). Anton Forsberg gets the start after being solid enough against Detroit.

This month is filled with games against teams either right around the Hawks or ahead of them, aside from Vancouver on Thursday and they didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory last time they were there. They see the Flames twice, Ducks, Stars, Wild, Kings and Sharks. This ain’t do disco, this ain’t no time for foolin’ around.

 

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Game #50 – Hawks vs. Predators Spotlight: If This Were Baseball, We’d Joke About PEDs

By Sam Fels 2853 0

We got a lot of things wrong last spring. To be fair to us, which we ourselves never are, just about no one saw the Predators sweeping the Hawks, even if they thought they would be a real threat. And the biggest thing we didn’t see coming is Pekka Rinne throwing a .960 at the Hawks in four games.

He’s apparently still pissy about that.

Somehow, Rinne is playing the best hockey of his career at age 35. His .937 save-percentage at even strength is the highest of his career, and by four points over his 2011 and 2015 mark (at least that season he did lose control of his limbs against the Hawks in the playoffs. We had precedent, dammit!). His overall .927 mark would be the second highest of his career, only trailing the .930 of that same ’10-’11 season.

Look a little deeper, and Rinne’s numbers get even more impressive. The difference between his actual save-percentage at evens versus his expected save percentage, i.e. a rating of the chances he’s seeing, not just the amount, is far and away the best of his career. It’s 1.09 (.937 at evens vs a xSV% of .925). The next highest mark in that category in his career is .72, and that’s a massive difference.

You may want to suggest that he’s benefitting from the Preds superb blue line and the fact that the Preds have the puck all the time limiting the shots he sees. But A) this is actually the lowest expected save-percentage that Rinne has had since 2010, so the Preds’ firewagon style is exposing him more than he has been before. Second, the Preds are a middling possession team, the very definition of it at 50% in Corsi-percentage. They’re expected-goals percentage as a team is even worse at 47.7%. They give up a lot.

Which is why Rinne’s season is so impressive, though might be a little more perilous than Preds fans would like. His SV% on high-danger chances is .845, the highest of his career by 48 points. That could be a problem. It’s the third-highest mark in the league among starters, trailing Ben Bishop and Sergei Bobrovsky and just ahead of Lundqvist and Vasilevskiy. Maybe this isn’t a problem if you think Rinne is among that level of starters. He hasn’t been for years until this one, is he really rejoining that club at 35?

So what gives? JR Lind in our Q&A suggests it’s rest, and that could be part of it. Rinne is slated to only start about 60 games this year, the third-straight season he’ll be around that total. But he hasn’t missed any time due to injury, it’s just been a straight rotation as Juuse Saros has been able to shake off early-season blahs to be one of the league’s better backups. But can that explain it all?

There just isn’t much of a precedent for a goalie having a resurgence at 35. The first name you obviously think of is Tim Thomas, who won Vezinas at 34 and 36 along with a Conn Smythe at the latter. But Thomas wasn’t anywhere until his 30s. Rinne was a frontline starter in the league at 26. Lundqvist is having another excellent season at 35, but his form never really dropped. He’s just always been this. Like Rinne though, Lundqvist is having a miraculous season when it comes to high-danger chances, with a .844 SV% on them which betters anything he’s done in the past five years by a long way. Corey Crawford, though obviously a few years younger than both, was also having his best season on high-danger chances before he went to the land of wind and ghosts. Bobrovsky is putting up his second consecutive season of robbing people with the best chances.Ben Bishop is having his best season in that spot as well. What exactly is going on here?

Perhaps this is just a league-wide trend, as goalies get better and better. Perhaps due to expansion and flattening cap, teams just don’t have the amount of finishers that they once did to bury these chances, whereas teams can find one guy to stop them much more easily than five or six guys to score them. Whatever it is, Rinne is certainly riding the wave and the Preds hope it goes until June.

 

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Game #50 – Hawks vs. Predators Q&A: J.R. Lind, Post His Own Rumble Party

By Sam Fels 1899 0

You’ll have to excuse JR a bit. Apparently down in Nash-Vegas, he hosts an enormous Royal Rumble party every year. When we sent this to him, he wasn’t sure who he was and definitely didn’t know how his arms worked. We thank him for playing hurt. 

 

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Game #50 – Hawks vs. Predators Douchebag Du Jour: He’s A Doughboy Again

By Sam Fels 1875 0

It’s a relief to make fun of some other team’s gooey bag of nougat instead of our own, so we present Ryan Johansen.

Here’s something strange for you. All of Johansen’s stats are down from last year. He’s scoring less, he has less points per game, his relative Corsi is down, his defensive stats are worse, and he’s not getting nearly as many attempts as he did last year for himself. Now, you may be asking yourself, “What could have happened that caused this? It’s merely luck, right?”

Oh right, the Predators handed him a new contract worth north of $8 million a year for the next forever. Isn’t that curious.

Of course, Johansen has pulled this act before. The Jackets signed him out of his entry-level deal with a lot of rancor, and then he pissed John Tortorella off so much he got him launched out of town for Seth Jones. We all made fun of Torts then, and it’s hardly a challenge to get his anger up. And yet, here we are again. Most nights Johansen has looked like a bag of pancake batter than the ass-kicker he flashed last spring.

Sure, RyJo Sen might be waiting for the playoffs where he can pull his red-ass act off again as he did last year before he got hurt (and might have cost the Preds the Cup). Maybe he’s a little unlucky, as his shooting percentage has sank. And yet there’s enough stink around Johansen from Columbus that he’s going to have to prove it again in the spring. Then again, we’d love nothing more than for the Preds to have their own boat anchor of a contract to live with. It fun to make fun of others for a change.

 

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The Thinking (Or Drinking?) Man’s Awards – At The All-Star Break

By Sam Fels 2041 0

Time to get down again. For those who are new to our deranged family, every so often I like to delve into what the end-of-season awards would look like if everyone actually paid attention to what was really going on during the NHL season. This will always remain my wish, but hey, it’s fun to dream and hope. So let’s get to it.

Hart – This one’s pretty simple. You hand it to Nathan MacKinnon, or Nikita Kucherov if you’re feeling spicy. I don’t think either is a wrong choice. You could even make a case for Phil Kessel, who has kept the Penguins afloat while they try and figure shit out and kick through some fatigue. MVP is still kind of easy to measure. Goals are how games are won, and whoever is scoring and creating most of them, with the least help, probably should get the award.

Vezina – Easy as well. Hand it to Andrei Vasilevskiy. He’s got the league’s highest save-percentage, and the second biggest difference between his actual save-percentage and his expected. So he’s not benefitting hugely from a great defense in front of him.

Calder – Again, this isn’t hard. Mathew Barzal. He’s on pace to have the greatest rookie scoring total in over a decade. He’s made the Islanders relevant, and even interesting even though they can’t play defense worth a shit.

Selke – Ok, this is where the rubber meets the road. As we’ve previously stated, this award always goes to a center that everyone knows, who wins a lot of draws and scores a lot too and has developed a reputation as a defensive center simply because everyone says so. And that center is always Patrice Bergeron. And that’s not entirely wrong. You can make a solid case for him every year. You can for this one. When we looked at this in mid-December, we were actually making a case for Winnipeg’s Adam Lowry. Let’s see if that’s still the case.

For best defensive forward, we should really look at who is holding down attempts against and limiting chances against. When it comes to the top five in attempts against per 60, it’s still Lowry, Bergeron, Tanev, Backes, and Marchand. Strange that they all play on the same lines, eh? (except for Backes). When it comes to types of chances against, the top five in expected goals against per 60 at evens is Mikko Koivu, Lowry, Granlund, Tanev, and Jason Zucker. Again, all linemates. So let’s try and suss it out from who’s benefitting from playing on a great defensive team. Let’s get relative.

When it comes to best relative marks to their team in attempts against per 60, Lowry leads the pack again. He’s followed by Andrew Ladd, Koivu, Brandon Martinook (huh?) and Tanev. When it comes to relative xGA/60, your leaders are Lowry, Hagelin, Kase, Martinook, and Koivu. Again, it looks like Adam Lowry should be getting some votes here. As far as context, Bergeron plays much harder competition than Lowry, but Lowry starts in the offensive zone much less than Bergeron (40% to 60% for Bergeron, though that could be that the Bruins and Bergeron in particular are always driving the play into the offensive zone). Whatever, get original and give it to Lowry.

Norris – This one’s harder. You can’t just give it to the best defensive d-man because driving the play from the back has become so important in today’s game. But it’s gotta be more complicated than just handing it to the d-man with the most points, which would be John Klingberg. If you were going simply by who let up the least chances and attempts, you’d be handing this thing to Dan Hamhuis. Do you really want to do that? No, of course you don’t. If you were going by relative marks to their team in those categories, Hampus Lindholm would have that claim.

When it comes to total contribution, possession-wise, because that’s the entire job description, the leaders in CF/60 relative to their teams are HAMPUS! HAMPUS!, Giordano, Hamilton, Karlsson and Werenski. When it comes to relative xGF%, the only names you’ll see on both lists HAMPUS! HAMPUS! and Dougie Hamilton. Hamilton faces slightly tougher competition than Hampus, and both start in the donkey end the overwhelming majority of the time.

But neither are anywhere near the top of the scoring charts, so you can forget that.

 

Everything Else

Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight – January 25th

By Sam Fels 1466 0

First Screen Viewing

Maple Leafs vs. Stars – 7:30

Well, much to our chagrin, Ken Hitchcock has gotten the Stars humming again, and they’re only one point behind the Blues with a game in hand for the third automatic spot in the Central. The Leafs got a win last night of course, something that’s been a touch rare for them (happy to help). While Hitch has his faults, you won’t find a much better show than John Klingberg and the Stars’ top line these days. And the Leafs remain the Leafs, though that’s more potential than on display these days.

Second Screen Viewing

Avalanche vs. Blues – 7pm

The Avs finally lost a game, and now they’re only four points behind St. Louis so tonight’s game has some extra meaning for them. The Blues are headed for another goalie controversy/meltdown at the end of a season, which might be one of the few joys we get this year. Nathan MacKinnon has gone supernova, which makes for excellent television.

Other Games

Predators vs. Devils – 6pm

Lightning vs. Flyers – 6pm

Wild vs. Penguins – 6pm

Hurricanes vs. Canadiens – 6:30

Bruins vs. Senators – 6:30

Capitals vs. Panthers – 6:30

Flames vs. Oilers – 8pm

Blue Jackets vs. Coyotes – 8pm

Sabres vs. Canucks – 9pm

Islanders vs. Knights – 9pm

Jets vs. Ducks – 9pm

Rangers vs. Sharks – 9:30