Quote:
Originally Posted by I_H8_Crawford
Just wanted to respond to this - did you in any way account for score effects?
I.E. I am pretty sure NAS & WPG have more multi-goal wins than the Flames, which would naturally lead to them playing their lower lines more - don't need the 1st line out every other shift when you're up 3+ goals in a game.
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That's a good point. No I didn't use any kind of score adjusting or anything fancy, just the straight TOI/GP for Overall and EV for the top 12 Skaters. The only adjustment I made is if the player was less than 10 games played I tried to skip them as I thought it might skew the numbers.
As to the score adjusting, I went through Anaheim, St Louis, Colorado for similar standings comparison and Edmonton to see if they had a major shift due to score/McDavid factor.
I am not going to post the results since I can't figure out the formatting and they came out pretty similar to the first batch.
Calgary still tops the list for Overall use and Even strength use of the first line. As a % of total minutes, the Flames play their top guys the most and their bottom guys the least among all 7 teams. (Again this is based on top 3 mins played being first line. Ferland was somewhere near 6-7 for example)
The differences are minor, like someone mentioned earlier 1% is 30 seconds of ice-time, but Anaheim for example played their bottom 3 players 21% compared to 18% on the Flames. That's a minute and a half, quite a lot of time for fourth liners.
St Louis was most comparable to the Flames leaning more on the top 6 than the bottom 6. Edmonton, even with the McDavid factor relied on their top 3 less than the Flames. They also made more use of their bottom 6, they rolled 4 lines like Nashville and Winnipeg without the talent depth.
I was looking for backup that GG overuses his bottom lines, and really the numbers show the opposite. In this sample of half the West teams he does the opposite. Now again, timing of usage is just as important as raw time on ice. Early on in the season putting the fourth line out after a goal, or there was a couple times where a late shift in the 3rd by the bottom 6 cost a game (but I think its actually less than people think it is).
So I don't think this lets him off the hook for anything, but when comparing the Flames to a contender vs a bubble team, you can see how the lack of depth has dictated line use and the contenders rely much more on all 4 lines than the bubbles.