[Karl]

Random poster from another site.

The problem is this teams bottom of the roster is filled with players who can’t shoot the puck all that well. Players on this team with three goals or less include 3 (Brodie, Brouwer), 2 (Hathaway, Stone), 1 (Hamonic, Stajan), 0 (Kulak, Lazar). That’s 44% of our starting players who continuously go more than 10-12+ games without scoring, every time.

The craziest thing is Andrew Mangiapane has 16 goals for Stockton (those 8 players have 11 goals combined) and he hasn’t seen anything outside of fourth line minutes with the big club, playing with two players who couldn’t hit water on an island in Stajan and Lazar. Having one or two of Brouwer, Stajan, Lazar, Stone, Hamonic, Hathaway is fine on it’s own, but when you have that many of them, it becomes a major problem.

I’ve followed analytics now for a few years and I truly believe shooting percentages this low should regress back up to the mean (as historically it almost always happens), but if any team is going to defy this from happening it’s this team. Even players who I like, like Backlund, Brodie, Bennett aren’t that great of shooters, which again is fine if you can offset it with other players who can shoot the puck, but when the bottom of your roster is loaded with guys who just flat out can’t score, it becomes a major problem.

I’m finished pretending like this is a major coincidence of epic proportions, because this script has happened far too often this year.