Quote:
Originally Posted by madmike
Their 5v5 Corsi is actually excellent. Which may say more about the real value of Corsi than anything else.
Treliving wanted a team that's better in puck possession and that's what he got. The problem is they're bad at pretty much everything else.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by united
Puckon . net has them at 47.2%, good for 24th in the League. Corsica has them at 50.3%, good for 13th in the League. Neither is "excellent".
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I don't know where this is coming from, but the Flames' ES corsi after 16 games is 51.1, which is 9th in the NHL. Which isn't "excellent", but it's pretty good.
They are an average shooting team at even strength so far, 7.45% for 16th in the NHL (they were 4th last year). However, they're 26th in the league at even strength save percentage, and that's what's killing them at evens. Their goals-for percentage is 23rd. Is that likely to improve? Well, given that Brian Elliott has an .882 save percentage so far, and given that his 5 year average is .925, you can either say "he's a fraud who was never any good and Hitchcock's system can make a bad AHL quality goalie look like an all-star", or you can say "he may not put up the .930 he did last year, but he's probably going to end up over .910". The latter seems more reasonable to me.
On the power play, they're 28th in shooting percentage. Given the number of quality finishers that they can put on the ice, that seems unsustainable. However, the other big problem is shot rate, which is 24th in the league on the power play - they're only putting 46.2 pucks on goal per 60 minutes of PP time. Washington, in first, puts 62.9 shots per 60 on goal on the PP. The Flames are 9th in the league in PP time on ice, so they're getting power plays, but they're being hurt by a combination of not doing enough when they get the opportunities,
and not getting bounces.
They're also 9th in the NHL at PK time on ice, which could be better. They're average at preventing shots when on the PK (12th in the NHL), but those shots are going in at a high rate. The .810 team PK save percentage is second worst in the league, which is part of the same story on goaltending. Elliott averages around .890 shorthanded, so again, seems likely that this improves and the PK starts looking a bit better as the season goes along.
So here's the upshot of all of that. If you believe the numbers, it's pretty likely that the Flames' shooting percentage, both at evens and on the PP, will increase (they were 8.15 and 12.39 last year respectively), but they really need to get more pucks to the net on the power play. They've mostly been hurt by goaltending, as they were last year, but the difference is this year that the numbers Johnson and Elliott have put up have been well below their career averages, so there's reason to think that will improve, too. They should be a better team than the results they've been getting so far, and the numbers suggest that they in fact are better than those results. It's reasonable to expect them to start getting more wins, but they're still probably not good enough to overcome how bad this start has been.