Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
To the bold, I have thought about that as well. But the more I look at this, the more I think it isn't about the great offensive defensemen, it is very much a team stat.
OTT, CHI, DAL, CAL all in the bottom half. VEG, TOR, WAS all in the top half.
Off the top of your head, name me two other defensemen on Vegas, other than Engelland.
Obviously, personnel matters. Better players are going to get more points. But the more I look at t, the more I conclude that this is a team stat. And what really matters is the style of play.
And the correlation with making the playoffs is really high.
Again, I go back to the Flames. I would argue that the talent level improved every year for the stats I posted. Yet the points fell off a cliff.
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I think we are in agreement here. I meant to include something in the bolded part: The prevailing wisdom says that the teams with high end defensemen have the most success. My point in posting that was that there seems to be no link between the talent level and success on the back end. It does seem to be a result of the style of play, which leads to more offense overall, which leads to more points accrued by defensemen over the course of a season.
So I guess what we will be doing is looking at a couple of things instead of pure corsi events this season (although that should still be included as a PART of the analysis): shots created that cross the royal road, and ranking of points by defensemen (as a product of strong team play? I guess TBD). These two threads have given me something interesting to look at over the course of the next season.