I decided that my first, trembling step into statistical geekdom would be to do some ESP/60 (even strength points produced per 60 minutes worth of ice-time) . To that end, I went over to nhl.com and simply copied the available ice-time stats into an excel spreadsheet. Observe:
The data was sorted according to total ice-time over the course of the year from most to least (yup, that's Dion Phaneuf leading the team). Also included in the dataset (but outside of the screencapture to the left) was total PP and SH ice-time as well as averaged ES, PP and SH ice-time per game.Some items of interest before we proceed: Jordan Leopold was 3rd on the team in terms of total ice-time, even though he only played 74 games. While his ESP/60 stat is abysmal (as you will see below), it should be noted that his was a fairly significant loss, defensive-minutes-wise, on the back-end. Let's hope that the Zyuzin can step in and adequately fill that hole next year...
Anyways, back on track. Next, I rounded the total even-strenght ice-time for each player to the nearest minute. While this may skew the results a tiny bit, the degree of error is probably negligible.
After gathering the ice-time info, I transcribed all of the ES, PP and SH point totals for each player into the speadsheet. The final step was to set-up the ol' formula bar to calculate ESP/60 employing the data mentioned.
The results:
The Observations:- Some players, like Germyn, Giordano, Ritchie and Macdonald were excluded. They didn't play enough minutes nor gather enough points to generate any kind of significant number.
- Lundmark, Leclerc and Lombardi's ESP/60 numbers are somewhat inflated due to (relatively) small sample size. They each played only 437, 514 and 566 ES minutes repsectively. In addition, Mike Leclerc's ESP stat is probably totally irrelevant in terms of production as a Flame: he only played 15 of his 50 games in Calgary silks and produced a mere 5 points in that time. Some encouragement may be gleaned from both Lombardi and Lundmark's decent numbers, though. Especially considering that Lundmark scored 10 points in 12 games with Calgary, despite only averaging about 8-10 minutes per game. It's hard to say how much their numbers would dip if they were consistently given more minutes against harder (say, top 2 defensemen) opposition.
- Chris Simon was actually better at producing at ES than I expected. He didn't get a lot of ice-time, 636 minutes in 72 games, which likely speaks to his utility as an all around player.
- Despite his relatively sub-par season, Jarome was still the top ES producer (for a high minutes player) on the team. I would be interested to see how this compared to other top point-getters across the league (not too favorably I would guess).
- Dion Phanuef was the best ES scoring defenseman, despite getting most of his points on the PP (although his number is still below the likes of Stephane Yelle).
- Shean Donovan and Juice were actually pretty comparable in terms of production at ES. Keep in mind, though, that Huselius had a terrible start to the year in Florida (8 points in 24 GP). In addition, Huselius gathered more than half of his points on the PP (28 of 47).
- As we all knew, Jordan Leopold had a horrendous season, offensively (His PP stats are only marginally better). I expect him to be at least twice as good (0.76 ESP/60) with Colorado next season.
I'll look into doing up some ESP numbers for Tanguay (if I feel like it) in the near future. It'll be interesting to see how he compares - course his ESP production on a team like Colorado will undoubtedly be a little chubby as compared to the Flame's roster. I suppose I could interpret his ESP number in the context of the entire avalanche team...
...*sigh* this is a lot of work.
In the meantime, I may put together some PPP/60 for Flames players from last year. Or... I may just revert to linking to tsn.ca reports and making glib comments. I guess we'll see.
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