Everything Else

Angry At Numbers

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Been a while since I’ve taken a hack at one of these, so let’s get to it. These should obviously come with something of a caveat, as five games isn’t much of a sample size. However, seeing as how my time machine is on the fritz and I can’t zoom into the future a couple months and then come back with numbers with a bigger sample size, this will have to do. Blame the dog. She chased her ball in there and knocked something loose. Engineering isn’t really her thing.

65.5%, 64%

That’s Duncan Keith’s Corsi-percentage, which is tops in the league among defensemen, and in fact tops the every single player. Better yet, Niklas Hjalmarsson’s 64% is second in the league. Again, these numbers were piled up against some awful teams, other than Dallas. So you’d expect these numbers to be pretty high. But for comparison’s sake, Keith’s season long Corsi% last year when he won the Norris is 57%. Hammer’s number is impressive because A)he’s not really required to push the play as much as defend, B) he spent three games playing with both van Riemsdyk and Oduya and flipping from the left to the right and back again. While I still worry about Keith being now over 30 and maintaining this form, the opening signs are very positive indeed. We’ll find out more this week on the road, of course.

Everything Else

A Peek At Peaks, But No Perfect Pachydermus Percussion Pitch

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So I’ll come clean with you all. Some of my sense of urgency and frustration with the Hawks roster management and such stems from this deep fear I have that I haven’t really talked about. It’s creeping around there though, as ridiculous as it seems on the surface. And it’s this fear that the center of which this team is built around, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, are closer to the end of their peaks than they are to the beginning.

I know, it sounds preposterous. But a lot of studies, including this one, show that a forward’s scoring peak hits around age 25. Well, Kane is 25 and Toews is now past that mark.

However, when I was poking around about this stuff yesterday waiting for printing to finish, I was leveled out by the fact that the Hawks have two other forwards who have stayed above this slide.