NHL stats under the shortened season magnifying glass
Anything can happen in a shortened season.
Sure, Jaromir Jagr and Eric Lindros leading the league in points during the lockout-shortened 1995 season wasn’t surprising, but Boston’s Blaine Lacher coming within one shutout of leading the league wasn’t a popular preseason bet.
The possibility of unpredictability, plus the increasing importance of every game due to a sprint to the playoffs, means early season stats are becoming overblown, regardless of the small sample size. Every pointless streak gets magnified, as does every winning streak.
Here are some stats from early in the season that may or may not hold up once their small sample expires.
– Shea Weber has zero points through his first nine games of the season. Last year, his longest stretch without recording a point was five games and he finished the year with 49 points. The last time Weber went nine games without recording a point was in 2008-09. He finished that season with 53 points.
– Phil Kessel has zero goals through the first 10 games of the season. Last year, his longest stretch without scoring a goal was six games and he finished the year with 37 goals, the highest total of his career. The second highest goal total of his career is 36, notched in 2008-09 with Boston, a year he went 14 consecutive games without scoring a goal.
– This year, Steven Stamkos has yet to go more than one game without a goal. Last season, when he led the league with 60 goals, his longest stretch without a goal was five games.
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– Kessel has zero goals despite leading the league in shots. Over the last seven years, the fewest goals the league leader in shots has scored is 32 (the equivalent of 18-19 over a 48-game season). If Kessel continues shooting at his current pace, he will finish the season with 202 shots. To reach 18 goals over the next 38 games Kessel will need a shooting percentage of 11.25 percent. Only two times in his career has he scored on a better percentage of his shots—last season, when he scored 37 goals, and in 2008-09, when he scored 36 goals.
– Patrick Marleau is leading the league in goals with nine, on the strength of a 23.08 shooting percentage. Although it is highly probable that Marleau’s shooting will regress towards the league mean over the course of the season, it isn’t a guarantee. Since the NHL started tracking shooting percentage in 1967-68, the league leader has had a shooting percentage of less than 20 in only two seasons. If Marleau ends the year with a shooting percentage of 20, he will have scored 39 goals, the second highest total of his career.
– The Tampa Bay Lightning are one win shy of the Eastern Conference lead. They have gone 6-3 in their first nine games and are outscoring their opponents 40-23 over that stretch. That’s some pretty good hockey, about as good as when the Lightning went 6-3 from January 4 to January 21… in 2009, when they finished second last in the league.
– Thomas Vanek is off to the best start of his career, leading the NHL with 19 points through his first nine games. Last year Vanek scored 14 points through his first nine games, but only scored 47 through the next 69 games, finishing with 61 points. Buffalo fans can hope his start is more reminiscent of 2006-07 when he scored 13 points through his first nine games and ended the season with a career-high 84 points.
– Henrik Lundqvist is currently sporting a .900 save percentage, a whopping 20 percentage points below his career average. Over the first eight games of the season he only produced a save percentage over .915 in two games. The last time he started a season so poorly was in 2006-07, his sophomore season. Lundqvist finished that season with a .917 save percentage. One of the years Lundqvist started the hottest, 2007-08, he had a .927 save percentage through the first eight games, but finished the season with a .912 save percentage—the lowest of his career.
– The Washington Capitals are dead last in the NHL with five points in 10 games. To make the playoffs they would likely have to go 25-9-4 the rest of the season. The last time they had a winning percentage that good was in 2009-10—the year the team won the President’s Trophy. (hat-tip to Neil Greenberg https://twitter.com/ngreenberg/status/299168813528776705)
– Nail Yakupov has seven points in his first nine games. Over the last 15 years, the only first overall picks to start a season faster are Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane, Alex Ovechkin and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
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