Everything Else

Game #11 – Hawks vs. Blues Douchebag Du Jour: Another Night Of Fellating Ryan O’Reilly’s Faceoffs

By Sam Fels 1128 0

One of the many problems with cramming in this many games with one opponent in such a short amount of time is that we already know the narratives that will be belched out during the broadcast. Along with Eddie Olczyk’s newfound passion for slamming analytics or possession-numbers (he seriously must not have got a job or something because he wouldn’t consider them and thus is going to make everyone pay now), and the long-standing fascination with hit-stats, apparently the new argle-bargle for Pat Foley and Eddie O is faceoffs.

And there’s no one they love to talk about more on that subject than Ryan O’Reilly.

Sure, ROR is third in the league again in faceoff-win percentage at 62.4%. That’s par for the course for O’Reilly, who consistently has been among the league’s best. What it hasn’t stopped is his possession numbers from being middling at best, considering how much he’s starting in the o-zone this season, or his team from being a big ball of suck.

It’s not that faceoffs don’t matter. They just don’t matter as much as everyone seems to want to believe.

Last year, ROR was second in the league in FOW%. The leader was Antoine Vermette, He spent most of the season getting his head kicked in while a Duck and is now out of the league. Claude Giroux, Jonathan Toews, and Patrice Bergeron were behind ROR, and we know they’re some of the best possession players in the league. It can go either way.

Team-wide, faceoffs matter even less. Two of the top five teams in faceoffs last year didn’t make the playoffs, and a third, Philly, didn’t really have any business there either. Three of the bottom five and four of the bottom six were playoff teams. You find these kinds of numbers no matter what season you look.

It’s not that faceoffs are completely irrelevant. There are a few draws within each every game that do matter, and they’re usually on special teams or toward the end of a game. But there are so many that they become rather meaningless if you study them all at once. They’re a pebble in a river.

But that won’t stop Foley and Eddie from championing ROR as the cure for cancer and/or complaining about the lack of draws that the Hawks win. Strangely, Anisimov doesn’t win draws and yet can’t seem to do wrong in their eyes, though.  Some men you just can’t reach.

 

Game #11 Preview Suite

Preview

Spotlight

Q&A

Douchebag Du Jour

I Make A Lot Of Graphs

Lineups & How Teams Were Built

Everything Else

If It’s A Day That Ends In -y, Hockey Players And Fans Must Be Bitching

By 1412

Y’know, for a sport where both players and fans can’t wait to tell you just how tough and manly they are, and how tough and manly you aren’t when you point out that anything they’re saying doesn’t make an ounce of sense, they sure do whinge a lot. And it really doesn’t take much for them to do so. Even the slightest change in rules, or coverage, or even an interpretation of said rules, and you get everyone losing their mud.

So this preseason, because we have no evidence that this sort of thing will actually carry in to the regular season and have a strong hunch it won’t, the league is trying to change the ways it enforces faceoffs and slashing penalties.

And it’s led to stuff like this. Or this. Or this. Or this. And believe me, I could keep going. Preseason games started three days ago, by the way.

All it would take is the least amount of foresight from anyone involved to see what the league is doing here. The problem is foresight is territory for people who can reason and read. Those people do not find hockey to be much of a bastion.

Everything Else

I Want His Face… Off… To Stop Being Talked About

By 1132

The past couple weeks, I’ve seen more noise about the Hawks “faceoff struggles” than I have in a long while. It’s almost like people seem to feel that the Hawks were a dominant faceoff team for the entire Quenneville Era, which they most certainly have not been. And it’s almost like we didn’t figure out that faceoffs don’t really correlate to wins and losses and good and bad team, which we kind of have. Let’s delve deeper, hmmm?

Here are your top five best faceoff teams: Arizona, Carolina, Minnesota, Anaheim, and St. Louis. That’s two surefire playoff teams, two teams completely out of it, and one on the very borderline. Yes, you’ll find only non-playoff teams in the bottom five, but you’ll also find Nashville and Chicago in the bottom 10. That hasn’t stopped the Predators from being one of the best even-strength teams in the league.