It’s not enough data!
Normally for a shot metrics dashboard like this, you’d prefer to have at least 10 and preferably 20 games of data.
But I’m showing it to you anyway!
The reason is because, well, it actually does have a few interesting things embedded in it, and I’m going to walk you through what I see. Would be interested to hear if you observe anything else!
So without further ado …
Here is the dashboard, annotated with numbered points of interest (click to embiggen, an explanation of the dashboard is at the end if you haven’t seen it before):
Analysis
So referring to the numbers above, and remembering the caveat about how early as it is, here’s what I see of interest:
- Oh what a surprise, the McDavid line tops the board! The biggest thing to note here is that big discrepancy between McDavid’s blue Corsi line and his purple Danger line. Most players I expect will have those converge over the season. I expect with McDavid that divergence is going to stay.
- Mark Fayne only played the one game but hey, it was really good!
- I still think the best thing for his development (and the cap situation) is for Jesse P to spend a good chunk of time in the AHL. But these are nice numbers for a raw rook.
- Oscar and Adam aka KlefLar aka AdamBom are giving up an unhealthy edge in shot attempts, but are doing very nicely on the danger aspect. As I noted in point #1, this is a mild cause for concern, as these two tend to converge over time. However! Larsson has shown for the last couple of seasons that he is a better danger suppressor than he is a shot suppressor, so I expect that we may see this ‘poor shot, good danger’ being a persistent effect too. I can live with that!
- You can clearly see the recent uptick for Gryba and Nurse – they’ve played two really solid games in a row.
- Russell and Sekera started very strongly but have been falling off the pace the last while. This is what a lot of the “Russell warners” suggested was likely to happen. I don’t think it’s overly indicative either way, and have very much liked both Russell and Sekera’s game so far. But it’s something to keep an eye on.
- Like Nurse and Gryba, Nugey had a rough start to the season, but the last couple of games have been really solid, and against Vancouver I thought Nugey was the best of the Oiler forwards.
The other notable issue is that performance of the team outside of the McDavid line is a significant concern.
Those are the main things I see on this dashboard this early in the season. There are other things of note (like Pitlick’s shot metrics vs his 20% sh%!, but those are exactly the kinds of things that it really is too early to comment on. I’m more interested in some of the early trends around the key players and prospects).
How about you? See anything else interesting?
PS. Dashboard Explanation
If you haven’t seen this dashboard (I tweet it out regularly through the season, and will do more of these walkthroughs here at BLH every 20 or so games), here is how to read it:
- Every player with even a single game will show up. Blue background is a forward, yellow is for defensemen.
- The list is sorted by raw Corsi differential
- The blue/brown trace shows you raw Corsi differential over the course of the season so far. Blue means above breakeven, brown is below.
- The purple line shows my Dangerous Fenwick metric, which takes unblocked shots and adjusts them for danger (based on shot type and distance)
- Obviously, the farther above the line, the better!
- But really what you’re looking for is things like trends, hot and cold streaks, big divergences between raw and danger metrics, and so on
- I call it a dashboard because in a single image it gives you a really clear look on how every player on the team is doing over the course of the season, and that’s not easy to do!
- Feel free to tweet questions at me @OilersNerdAlert. You can also post questions in the comment section below, but for some reason my comments get eaten on a regular basis, so I might not be able to respond!
