Some Positive Spin
By Kent Wilson
13 years ago
(Puck Prospectus’ Robert Vollman tries to distract us all from the Flames lousy November with his recent numbers-based offering)
Down in the dumps about the losing skid and need some good news? After the downright heresy of suggesting that Lanny McDonald’s and Mike Vernon’s numbers shouldn’t have been retired, I felt I owed you one, so I’m going to share two pieces of good news.
Today I’ll be talking about individual scoring, for which I like to use a player’s even-strength scoring rate, or ESP/60 (even-strength points per 60 minutes). There are two things to know about ESP/60: it tends to be relatively consistent year-to-year, and the magic number of 1.8 keeps popping up.
We first discovered the magic number a couple of years ago in a study of top-six forwards. With surprisingly few exceptions, forwards that consistently scored above 1.8 earned top-line duty, whereas those that fell below were either traded, sent down, or converted to checkers and grinders. That magic number pops up all the time, including again recently in Tom Awad’s “Good Players” series, as a common trait of the league’s best forwards.
Which brings me to my point – how many top-six forwards do the Flames have? To answer any question like that, I like to take as large a sample size as possible. Even over 82 games, a single hot stretch can considerably skew a player’s statistics, so I’ve taken the past four seasons instead.
With that in mind, the NHL has 160 forwards that have averaged 1.8 ESP/60 over the last four seasons, having played at least 100 games. You’d expect there to be 180 of them (because 30 teams x 6 top-six forwards = 180), but the other 20 are rookies and sophomores who haven’t yet played 100 games. Of those 160 established top-6 forwards, the Flames have 10. That’s right, not 6, but 10.
Player – GP – ESP/60
Jarome Iginla – 316 – 2.65
Alex Tanguay – 289 – 2.40
Mikael Backlund – 24 – 2.23
Rene Bourque – 237 – 2.12
Olli Jokinen – 322 – 2.09
Daymond Langkow – 306 – 2.04
Curtis Glencross – 212 – 2.03
Craig Conroy – 304 – 1.91
Matt Stajan – 322 – 1.87
Niklas Hagman – 311 – 1.84
Brendan Morrison – 276 – 1.80
David Moss – 227 – 1.61
Ales Kotalik – 291 – 1.35
Tom Kostopoulos – 303 – 1.31
Ryan Stone – 35 – 1.27
Tim Jackman – 164 – 0.97
Raitis Ivanans – 276 -0.61
It’s true that Daymond Langkow is injured and it would be laughable to include Craig Conroy because of the contributor he used to be – but what about Backlund, or David Moss, whose 2.23 so far this season will soon lift him above the threshold?
In the end it doesn’t matter if the Flames have 8, 9 or 10, the point is that they have a solid depth of forwards who consistently score at the top-six level, a lot more than they’ve had in a very long time.
I promised you two pieces of good news, which brings me to our defensemen, and the newly acquired Anton Babchuk. Did you know that over this same period (the past four seasons) he leads all Flames defensemen in scoring rate both at even-strength and on the power play?
Defenseman – G – ESP/60 – PPP/60
Anton Babchuk – 124 – 1.04 – 3.86
Mark Giordano – 188 – 0.91 – 2.93
Jay Bouwmeester – 328 – 0.86 – 2.95
Adam Pardy – 117 – 0.69 – 0.00
Steve Staios – 278 – 0.67 – 1.63
Cory Sarich – 295 – 0.57 – 1.18
Robyn Regehr – 316 – 0.57 – 2.11
Brendan Mikkelson – 62 – 0.29 – 0.00
For reference, Ian White is 1.00 at even-strength and 2.12 with the man advantage – and had a much larger cap hit. Babchuk should help elevate the Flames offense from the blue line.
The acquisition of Brendan Mikkelson isn’t nearly as exciting, but he’s at least doing better than his father Bill Mikkelson, who has the NHL record for the worst single-season plus/minus, a whopping -82 for the Washington Capitals in 1974-75 (the same season Michel Belhumeur played 35 games in nets without posting a single victory).
The point is that while the Flames have hit some hard times and had some hard breaks, there are still at least a few things going their way. It’ll be an uphill battle, but the season is far from over.
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