Seven Game Segments At A Glance
By Ryan Pike
8 years agoLast season, Bob Hartley won the Jack Adams Award, as voted by the NHL Broadcasters Association. One of the main things that Hartley proponents pointed to as effective in driving the Calgary Flames’ 20-point turnaround were his use of seven-game segments to keep the team focused on short-term goals.
Winning the bulk of the seven-game series over the course of a season would equate with a playoff berth. The Flames ended up winning the majority of them last season and ended up going to the post-season. Seven-game segments are back this season.
Here’s a brief look at how they’re doing thus far.
Let’s start off with a table for an at-a-glance gander:
| 1-7 | 8-14 | 15-21 | 22-28 | 29-35 | 36-42 | |
| Record | 2-5-0 | 2-4-1 | 4-3-0 | 4-2-1 | 5-2-0 | 3-4-0 |
| Power Play | 15.8% | 10.5% | 16.7% | 7.4% | 16.0% | 20.8% |
| Penalty Kill | 78.3% | 76.2% | 66.7% | 53.3% | 93.3% | 72.7% |
| PDO | 94.1 | 95.1 | 100.0 | 102.3 | 101.4 | 102.8 |
| Score-Adjusted Corsi | 43.1% | 50.5% | 47.4% | 48.4% | 45.1% | 48.4% |
| Johnny Gaudreau | 1g, 8a 47.2% | 1g, 4a 52.7% | 3g, 3a 46.2% | 5g, 3a 47.6% | 7g, 4a 50.7% | 2g, 2a 55.3% |
| Sean Monahan | 2g, 2a 44.6% | 0g, 4a 46.3% | 5g, 2a 44.8% | 3g, 4a 47.9% | 2g, 2a 46.1% | 1g, 1a 57.3% |
| Sam Bennett | 0g, 1a 48.9% | 2g, 4a 51.8% | 2g, 2a 50.6% | 1g, 1a 51.6% | 0g, 1a 35.4% | 5g, 0a 51.3% |
| Mark Giordano | 1g, 3a 48.7% | 1g, 1a 50.8% | 0g, 0a 49.8% | 2g, 4a 50.4% | 3g, 4a 48.5% | 1g, 6a 57.9% |
| T.J. Brodie | Injured | 1g, 2a 56.7% | 1g, 2a 48.2% | 0g, 6a 47.5% | 2g, 5a 47.6% | 0g, 3a 53.6% |
| Dougie Hamilton | 1g, 0a 42.9% | 1g, 1a 58.7% | 0g, 0a 47.0% | 1g, 3a 51.4% | 2g, 2a 48.1% | 1g, 3a 43.8% |
The opening segment saw the Flames (a) have bad puck luck (expressed via PDO) AND (b) play their worst possession hockey of the season. Their special teams game was okay, but their 5-on-5 play was horrid – perhaps because T.J. Brodie was absent. Either way, they sucked. Johnny Gaudreau had nine points, but he was surrounded by a bunch of confused players.
The Flames started to get their legs under them a bit in the second segment, actually playing some damn good possession hockey but being mired by everybody staying cold (except for Sam Bennett), the power-play slowing down and the team maintaining some awful puck luck in that span.
Gaudreau and Sean Monahan warmed up a bit in the third segment, while the team as a whole got a bit better. The bottom started to fall out of their penalty kill, but their 5-on-5 play was adequate and their puck luck was improved.
The bottom fell out of their special teams play in the fourth segment, with an abysmal power-play and an abysmal penalty kill. However, the team’s possession game stayed decent and they got improved puck luck and managed to ride their 5-on-5 play to some wins. Gaudreau, Monahan, Brodie and Giordano all put up good numbers in this segment.
The Flames were white-hot in the fifth segment, winning five games. The penalty kill was uncharacteristically excellent – to degrees we haven’t seen before or since – and the team had decent puck luck that compensated for a lagging possession game. It also helps that basically everybody but Bennett put up solid points, including Gaudreau, Giordano, Brodie and Hamilton having their best segments of the season.
The sixth segment, the latest complete segment this season, was a mixed bag. The power-play was excellent. They had pretty good puck luck. Their possession game was slightly improved from the previous segment. But aside from good production from Bennett, Giordano and Hamilton the rest of the big guns didn’t produce massively, and the penalty kill crashed back to mediocrity – which likely cost them in tight games.
LAST SEASON
- Segment 1 (1-7): 4-3-0
- Segment 2 (8-14): 4-1-2
- Segment 3 (15-21): 4-3-0
- Segment 4 (22-28): 5-2-0
- Segment 5 (29-35): 0-6-1
- Segment 6 (36-42): 4-3-0
- Segment 7 (43-49): 5-2-0
- Segment 8 (50-56): 5-2-0
- Segment 9 (57-63): 3-3-1
- Segment 10 (64-70): 4-2-1
- Segment 11 (71-77): 4-1-2
- Segment 12 (78-82): 3-2-0 [5 games]
The Flames won or broke even on every segment of the season except with the one containing the PDO-driven losing skid in December. But almost like clockwork, they racked up between seven and 10 points in every segment. And when you look at their underlyings, man, they never really fell off a cliff.
Here’s a rolling five-game look at their Score-Adjusted Corsi last season.
SO WHAT?
One thing that’s made evident when splitting the season into segments: these guys are really inconsistent, but a good deal of that can be blamed on their horrendous special teams (especially in the context of how their possession and PDO numbers). Here’s the same rolling five-game look at Score-Adjusted Corsi and PDO, but for this season instead.
As we’ve noted before this season, the Flames are fundamentally a better hockey club than they were last season – if you laid this year’s moving average over last season’s, this year’s is generally a slight bit higher. That said, their PDO just isn’t quite what it was last year – when it was unsustainably high – and they can’t survive the wild swings in their special teams (and their best players going hot and cold almost at random).
Does this mean that Hartley’s “short-term focus exercise” of the seven-game segments was smoke and mirrors? Not entirely, but a great deal of the team’s success last season – both split up into seven-game chunks or as an 82-game mass – was due to sky-high PDO allowing the Flames to overcome some shaky possession hockey. That PDO has evaporated this year, particularly early in the season, and to a degree so did their success.
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