The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 115: With The Benefit of Hindsight

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

Micah Blake McCurdy joins the show to discuss how well early-season numbers translate towards the rest of the season, the biggest surprises thus far, and where we most noticeably went right vs. wrong with our projections before the year. Here’s a quick rundown of the topics covered: 0:30 What early-season stats can tell us 2:45 New York Islanders struggles 8:50 How long can the Rangers keep scoring this often? 11:45 Bruins surprising depth 15:00 Flyers inability to get a save 18:30 Ottawa Senators under Guy Boucher 26:30 More concerned: Predators or Stars? 31:10 Winnipeg's young offensive talent Every episode of this podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and can also be streamed straight from this website. Make sure to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss out on any new episodes as they’re released. All ratings and reviews of the show are greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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Welcome to the Hockey PEDEOCast. My name is Dimitri Vilpovich and joining me back by popular demand. It was the preseason breakout star, Micah Blake McCurdy. Micah, what's going on then? Not much, I'm feeling good. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm excited to have you back on. We had last recorded right before the season started, and now a month has passed. We've seen each team play roughly 20% of their schedule so far, give or take.

And we were talking off air before we started recording another day about how, I think people would generally be surprised about sort of, the correlation or how well tied a team's possession metrics are this early in the season. And then when you reach this point, how well they sort of predict how well the team's going to do the rest of the season. I know that's something you were linking into a few years ago. And I just kind of stumbled upon that myself. It's a little remarkable because it's so very tempting to say, oh, you know, oh, it's still

early, it's still early. but then you get haystack problems where it's still early becomes all of a sudden we've got to make a move we got to do something and if you're not you're not watching carefully you can find yourself really really taken it back and like you said 20% of the season that's you know if you want to break your season into fifths we're already one done right and i mean it doesn't make a little bit of sense just because i know that every time around the preseason especially the past few years uh we've all sort of noticed that if you look at a team's numbers in the final 25 games of the season somewhere around there it's it's a much better predict or looking at the full season sample size. So it makes sense that kind of that 20 to 25 game range would be pretty telling about how good a team really is or where they're really deficient. Yeah, you can, I mean, 10 or 12 games can be thrown off by something like a really serious injury or that sort of thing.

You know, 25 games even if not so easy to throw off like that. But yeah, you can almost always tell if, even if you're being misled by some numbers, if you've been paying close attention, you can normally tell, you know, lie. Like what sort of thing might happen? Like, for instance, there were lots of people who were really worried about Nashville who weren't paying attention to the fact that they had bad food poisoning for a little while. Right. Which is, you know, it doesn't excuse the fact that they lost games because they played badly. But, you know, but it's not the sort of thing that lasts. That's not like a, you know, not the kind of problem that sabotages you for a season. Yes, yeah, definitely. Or, I mean, that would be a pretty, pretty bad case of the food poisoning if it sabotaged you for the full season.

Yeah, I suppose that that would be where you would start making some investigation. Yes. Well, we'll talk about the predators in a second, but I think that, you know, it'd be kind of fun exercise if we circle back to that discussion we had in the preseason as I mentioned and discuss sort of where we went wrong, where we went right, sort of, and why that is. I think it's always a good learning experience to kind of look back at your projections and your predictions and see where you can go from there. So, I mean, I think the obvious place to start is the New York Islanders. I had Mike Johnson on the podcast last week, and we did a little bit of a deep dive on them. but I mean, I remember your model had him as, I think, the third highest metro team and was very down on the Rangers. And now we're, you know, it was very understandable based on what we'd seen from these two teams in the past couple years.

But you look at it now 20 games, around 20 games in, and it's changed quite a bit, just the way we view these two teams. So, yeah, the Islanders, I, preseason, I had them on pace for 95 points. in fact yeah just 95.3 points and so they're down they're already down eight points on that projection which is partially because they've lost a whole pile of games and partially because they've played much much worse than I expected them to

and the big surprise to me is the shots that they allow is they've never I mean that's that's the big part of their reason why their stats look rough is that they for whatever reason can no longer seem to prevent incredible numbers of shots from piling up They're still getting their fair share or almost, which again is a little misleading because the Islanders used to play an up-tempo brand of hockey, whereas now they're only getting, you know, NHL average sort of numbers of shots.

And then when you compound that with effect of the last three or four games, their goaltending has completely deserted them, you know, that's what gets you the kind of crushing run of hockey that we're seeing now, which is not just, you know, you can survive losing a handful of games in a row, but it's very difficult both as a fan-based and as a coach and as the, and as an observer to watch that kind of run of hockey and not be disturbed. Well, so I remember that,

last time we chatted, we discussed a lot about kind of coaching effects and how new coaches would impact teams like the avalanche and the senators and the ducks. But it's really tough for me to sort of differentiate here between how much of it is a talent issue because there definitely are holes on this roster and Garth Snow isn't without blame. But then you look at something like Cal Clutterbock just basically being tied to John Tavares and it just seems like that's something that would be pretty avoidable and they definitely have better options in their roster. So how much of this do you think is coaching and how much of this?

you think is just a lack of talent? In this case, I'm tempted to point the finger more at coaching than talent because the roster seems considerably, I mean, there's turnover in every roster every year, but it doesn't seem plausible to me to point at the roster and say, well, you know, it's so different. you know, Kyle Opposo was somehow the glue that kept the Islanders together offensively. I mean, O'Pozo was underrated. He's a legitimate offensive talent much more than people giving credit for.

but I don't feel like that somehow that like him and one other, two other pieces have somehow undermined the talent at the islanders. And especially when you look at the personnel decisions, it starts to seem, I don't know if I would say bad, just inexplicable. You know, Clutterbuck getting first line minutes is a little bit bizarre. And it was telling, for instance, last night,

the Capulana scrambled his lines completely. He was only playing with 11 forwards, which makes it tougher. But even still, it seemed like it really, was pretty much random three forwards over the boards for every shift. And the one constant of all of that was that Kleatherbuck got to play with Tvers completely all the time. They were joined at the hip. And so at very least, I would, you know, I would love to hear some sort of explanation

for that. Is he playing in some style that Capulano likes and hopes that by rewarding him in this way, other players will continue to also play in that style, in which case it's simply ill-advised, you know, but if he really thinks that Kletabuck, playing those kinds of minutes with those kinds of quality of teammates is really giving his team the best chance to win that I think that's just misguided. I mean, coaches are weird like that though. I mean, you're seeing with the capitals right now that, you know, they're putting,

Barry Trotz is putting Ovechkin and J. Beagle together because they have the right combination of skill and will that he wants all of his players to play with. You, you know, we look at this stuff where it's like, okay, I don't know why that's happening, but, you know, these coaches apparently think that that's just the way to go sometimes. I don't know. It's kind of head-scratching to me. You have more leeway, of course, when you have a greater concentration of talent in Washington, which means that, you know, you, so you take somebody like Jay Beagle, who maybe doesn't deserve to play those kinds of minutes, but then if that's taking somebody

like Brokowski or Kuznetsov or a handful of other great players, great forwards that the capitals have, if they're being shuffled around somewhere else, that's strengthening up your lower lines, then, you know, then you're getting, even if it might not be my choice, it's not nearly as bizarre when you're getting something back for what you give up. And, well, and of course there are some players, you know, who seem to be able to carry literally any line mates or literally any defense partner, you know, players like Crosset, players like a reticant who can play with anyone and make them better. And I would have considered Tavares in that category, but then, you know, those gradations

even among the greatest of players. So that lineup, that, ability to move up and down through the lineup is something that you can do if you have fewer holes like the capitals do compared to the islanders. And there's plenty of teams who aren't able to do that and who have to be very careful to make sure that, you know, that they have two or preferably three really solid lines, even if their fourth is not so great. You know, whereas other teams have been making a real show of rolling four lines. And the Rangers that you mentioned earlier are a great example of that. I mean, that's part of why they've been so successful is that they've been able to put together four lines, which can all threaten.

Well, okay, so let's move into the Rangers then on kind of more uplifting, positive and use that Islander's discussion bummed me out a little bit. It's interesting because obviously, you know, it's our nature to just look at a team like the Rangers and be like, well, I mean, they're shooting over 12% of 5-1-5. That's obviously not going to continue and they're going to come back down Earth a little bit. I mean, all of their kind of underlying metrics are a bit juiced right now. But it's, even if they regress and fall back down earth a bit, I mean, they've built such a cushion offensively between themselves and the rest of the league that, you know, they can handle a rough patch here and still come out looking pretty good in the overall season total. And it's funny because I remember before the season, we lump them and the Canadians together and we were discussing how reliant they were on their goalies and how we still like them as playoff teams just because how good those two guys were.

But I honestly have to admit, I didn't really see this offensive explosion. coming from them heading into the year? No, and you're definitely right. Their shooting percentage is higher than you would expect and almost certainly can't last. But on the other hand, you know, we say it's going to come back down to Earth, but Earth is different for different teams.

And the Rangers have traditionally been, especially their forward group, have traditionally been, have had career, or not say, percentage, career personal shooting percentage is higher than the NHL average, and I don't think there's any reason to think that that's going to be different this year. So their natural resting point, you know,

intuitively I feel it's probably a shade lower than what it is now, but it's not like when a regression comes for them, it's not going to be some sort of earth-shaking thing. It's going to be, you know, a few less goals every few games. And considering that the numbers they're putting up now, I don't think it's going to be great cause for concern, especially if you can see it coming.

Of course, the big thing with the Rangers, again, with the surprise with the Island, it's the same with the Rangers as the surprise is the number of shots against. The trouble last year was that the Rangers were giving up too many shots, especially too many shots in sequence. they would not just give up so many shots, but they seemed to be able to defend their own blue line, but they weren't able to attack their own blue line.

So they couldn't play offense in their own zone, in the sense of getting the puck over the line. Right. And so every time that they allowed an entry, they were allowing shot after shot after shot. And there were a handful of players who were especially guilty of that, Dan Gerardi being the most obvious one.

And he hasn't exactly impressed this year, but he's been better than last year when he was dire. So there's a handful of other moot changes that they've made on defense, which have so far appeared to work. So that's definitely the big surprise to me is that they're not leaking, dangerous shots that really forced them to rely on Lundquist quite as much as I expected and also not shots in just as same quantity as before. Right.

Yeah, no, there are teams that they're rolling right now. It seems like they can't do anything wrong. I want to talk to you about the Bruins a little bit, because I don't think your model really loved them heading into the year. And I personally thought they had a chance to be really bad. I mean, if Zeno Chara kept kind of on this downward pace, he had been on the past few years, like they were in trouble, especially on that blue line,

they just didn't really seem to have very many serviceable options. But, I mean, I look now and they're first and shot metrics. And the weird thing to me is they're giving up the fourth few of shots in the league behind teams, like the blue sharks and kings who you'd expect to be sort of, these defensively sound very strong possession teams. So it just, I don't, like, what are you seeing, what are you seeing with the Bruins right now? Because, obviously, Chara and, and his partner, Brandon Carlo,

are, you know, shouldering a heavy workload. But it seems like it's kind of been a little bit of a group effort. Yeah, it definitely has. And, and of course, the, the shots against our is remarkable. And also they're generating a tremendous number of shots, especially recently. Yep. Which is, which is, again, very surprising.

you can never be too surprised with a handful of really excellent players like Marchand Bergeron. But the although the way that their results have come in have not been, they haven't won that many games considering the

numbers they've been putting up. So there's been a bit of ill fortune for them there too. I had them as a bubble team going into the season that they were looking at 84 points or so, maybe losing or winning on a tiebreaker. But for sure that part of the reason is that they have what appears to be almost like a top three,

the way that they're deploying their defenders. So Char is definitely shouldering a heavier load, but for him, right, this year he's playing about 23 minutes total, which is actually less than he used to. Carlo is up at around 22. Krug is up at around 21, so you have three guys who are playing considerably more than 20 minutes a game. And then their bottom three, as it were, the McQuail's last. and Miller are playing something like 19, 17 and 16. So even when your number six defender is playing 16 minutes a night,

that's the kind of depth defense that lets you stay flexible, that lets you not get wedged into corners. Because you can use your sort of heavy horses, as it were, a little more selectively. That gives you a lot of options. It keeps you healthy. And so there aren't, you know, it sounds like it's splitting, a little bit, but there aren't very many teams who can trust their third pair to play those kinds of minutes. And Lous and Miller are not, you know, nothing to write home about, but they're better than most third pairs.

So that really, you know, that helps, you know, all those little incremental things, especially in defense, adds up. When you don't have any, you know, you don't have any glaring weaknesses that you can exploit, where you know, you're consistently getting, you just have lost shifts where you, where you can't possibly hope to do anything with the puck. Yeah, which is what I thought. When you can avoid that problem, yeah. Right, and I thought they'd have a lot of that where, I mean, we knew that the top of this roster was really good, and I think maybe I didn't even give them enough credit, just how good they'd be. I mean, this pasturnac, Marciaan, Bergeron, Bergeron line is arguably the best line in the league right now.

Whenever they're on the ice, they're pretty much controlling all the shots, all the scoring chances, and all the goal. It's crazy. But, yeah, the rest of the team has kind of picked up the pace as well, and that's not something I was expecting. Let's talk a little bit of the Flyers because, you know, one thing we sort of, you could hang your hat on with this team was that they'd have good goal tending. And people had been skeptical of Steve Mason for years, even though his numbers had suggested that he was at least a league average, if not, you know, handily above league average guy ever since he came to Philly. But this year, they have the league worst five-on-five save percentage. And that's surprising to me, especially after being second best last year and I think seventh or eighth best the year before. So I don't know. Is it just one of those things where, you know, goaltending, man, we just don't know. And it's one of those things that it'll even out eventually, or is there something that's kind of systemically wrong here?

To me, it looks like a flash in the pan. I know that's not easy for Philly fans to hear, where, you know, especially when you're being told by that decision that your goaltenders are great, and then they come out and they do something like this. You know, and then, of course, you know, which is it's a shame to pile, to literally pile insult upon injury after all because Noirte is hurt badly and will be out for quite some time.

But I think there's no real reason to suspect that anything is seriously wrong with Steve Mason in particular. And I don't think there is anything seriously wrong with Noirth either. So I think once their goal tending regresses, which, you know, and regression is one of those things that doesn't have a time scale. you know, you expect the talent level that you've come to expect from all players, including from goaltenders, every night. So it's not like, you know, it's not like you do that somehow, because you play badly,

you'll play better, but you expect them to play at their natural talent level nightly. And you can be fooled by a handful of coin flips that go against you and, you know, or even more than that. The good thing in Philadelphia is that they've also had a fairer bit of good fortune also. So their record is sort of a float, as it were, compared to what it might be considering their goaltending because they've managed to press when losing very, very well, much better than the average team.

They've managed to find a lot of equalizing goals, a lot of comeback goals. And so it is part of the rough with this move, if you're like, it probably doesn't feel like that they only have four regulation wins. It's not, you know, it's not like you would look at the record and what's going on and throw it off so far and think, you know, oh, that's excellent. But you've had considerably less than career goaltending, career typical goaltending from your goaltenders, which means you should expect that to get better.

And despite that, you've still managed to salvage a very few number of points and are still on pace for a tiebreaker in the wildcard spot by my projections at the moment. So, you know, there's nothing, I mean, as optimistic takes go, that's not very optimistic, but it's not the kind of sky is falling. Everything is bad. You know, Hextall has to make a deal. Haxall has to change everything. It's not that kind of situation at all for me.

Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing how, you know, we can preach being rational and process over results, but then a few bad goals here or there, and then all of a sudden you kind of just, like, it's very easy for fans to just throw that out the window and get all crazy. But I think that ultimately it's going to be fine there, especially. I'm a big Steve Mason fan And I think that now that they're just going to basically ride him And give him every start, I think that's going to

It's going to bode well for them Before we get out of the Eastern Conference and move on to the west Let's take a few minutes to discuss the Ottawa senators Who I know are very near and dear to your heart And we discussed the coaching change before And what Gie Bouchet would be able to do And whether they'd be able to shore some things up defensively And at least just looking at the shot metrics

It looks like they've once again been pretty porous in terms of giving up opportunities in bunches. Have you noticed any sort of noticeable changes that the new coaching staff has brought in? And is there more reason for optimism there was in years past? A little bit, sort of cautiously optimistic. Not as optimistic as I was about the flyers where a lot of the negative things look reasonably clearly like statistical outliers. It's funny, I think a lot harder about the senators than I do about a lot of the other teams

and I come away more confused. There's a lot of very strange things going on, and it appears that Boucher and his decisions, not all of which I understand at this point, some of which look good and some of which look bad, it looks like Boucher's decisions affect what's going on more than I would have expected, and I can't quite discern for good or for ill yet.

So, for instance, if you look at shot measures, it's true, you see that they've been giving up a lot of shots, recently especially. early on they played a much tighter game, which I don't think suited them, although they did manage to win several of those games. Recently, in the last handful, five or six games, there's been a big uptick in the amount of offense

they've been able to generate, which I think is the way they have to play. I think they have the kind of roster that ought to play an up-tempo sort of game. I think they should mob themselves on a team like the Stars, where they should play, especially considering the quality of the gualtening they have. And so if they're moving to that,

I think that will be a big, improvement. The other thing that's very unusual is that there if you look at all shots, at the shot, just took a really broad, look at their total shot percentage, then you look at their total unblocked shot percentage, then you look at their

total expected goals percentage. So with a quality waiting on the kinds of chances that they've been generating and been giving up, you get three totally different stories. If you look only at total shots, then they're being submarined, they're giving up way too many and big changes after we made.

If you look only at unblocked shots, which normally tail very closely to total shots and generally predict equally well. On a broad sense, there's no reason why you would pick one over the other unless you have an extremely outlandish shot-blocking or avoiding shot-blocking strategy. If you look at unblock shots,

then you see something that's a little bit below average, very close to the average in the last three, four, five years. nothing to give you hope really but nothing to say oh you know something definitely different and then if you look at the quality measures they've been generating you say to yourself well you know actually the team is really really good and they've been you know like maybe 53 54 percent quality good and they've been you know sort of second tier quality in the league and they're like five to ten range and and they've just been extremely unfortunate with offense and that once the goal start to go in you know then they're going to look like their ranges somehow that the regression is going to come from

the other way. So there's a lot of, there's kind of something for everybody, and it's a little funny to watch the arguments on Twitter where the people who are down on the team say, well, look, they're clearly terrible. And the people who are perennial optimists say, oh, look, they're clearly wonderful. And I'm left. I mean, that's the temptation. It's just to say, well, it must be somewhere in between that. But I, you know, I try to just find out what the truth is and then stick to it, whether it's the extreme on one side or the extreme on the other side. And I'm afraid I can't I can't figure it out at this point. The real trick, of course, will be if it's true that they're that they're systematically generating very high quality chances, but they're not scoring, then you will see a healthy uptick in goals for.

The goals against should stay mostly as they happen. I don't think there's such, I don't think there's such an unusual disparity there. So if you want to watch something in particular, if they're, if they're scoring numbers, if their goal numbers start to go up, that I think you might, you might start to think that, maybe it's really strong. But if they continue to play the way they have been and still generate very few goals for game, then maybe the naysayers are right. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because, you know,

you'd expect someone like Mike Hoffman, for example, to be scoring a lot of those goals for them, and he only has three right now, and you kind of look deeper and wonder what's wrong, and then it just basically looks like it's a shooting percentage thing where he was like a 12, 13% guy for the past two seasons, and then now it's cut in half at 6%. and I know he's a guy that shoots a lot from the perimeter and he gets away with it

because he has such a lethal shot. But I find it hard to believe that after watching him for the past two seasons, that all of a sudden he's like a well below league average finisher. Like I think that it's reasonable to expect that that's going to kind of normalize eventually. Yeah, I agree. And of course, all shooters are streaky. All scorers are streaky. And Hoffman, like you say, because of the way that he relies on his pure shooting scale,

if you like, that maybe makes him more streaky. If he's, you know, like, if you rely on being able to pick corners, even if your ability is still there, that you're taking what to other people would look like low percentage shots much more often and so that you're going to get a, statistically, you're going to get a streakier effect from that. So maybe there's one good fortune there for the senators is that Giebusha is coaching specifically because he, for historical reasons and just temperamental reasons, is giving Mike Hoffman much, much longer leashed than the, pardon me, than he got in years past, which is good, considering

precisely this scenario. Yep. Yeah. Let's move on to the West. I think we're going to spend less time on the West than we just did on the East because, I don't know. Obviously, you know, I work for sports then, and we have a big East Coast bias, of course. But other than that, I just think that the Eastern Conference is weirdly more intriguing

than the West to me this year. I don't know if you find it that way, but I think that it definitely, I mean, the bottom end just isn't nearly as bad as it is out in the Pacific, so it makes me just kind of more interested just because you see better, more competitive games than we do out West? I don't know what it is. Well, I think there's a lot of teams in the East

who are very close to the playoff cutoff. Right. And that, for fan engagement, I think that's really fun. I mean, by my count, I think that there are 10 teams that are within five points, that I project now to be within five points of the playoff cutoff at the end of the year. just in the east, 10.

So that's a pile of excitement. You're getting a matchup between those teams almost every night. You know, so the, you know, it's only, it's not even, it's not even advent yet, and the playoff implications are already becoming very amusing. And I don't think you're seeing that in the West. You know, there's also a little bit of bunching up, but then there's just not as many teams, which means that, you know, you don't get quite as much, quite as many races.

And, of course, the really weak teams of the league, this year, I mean, I only count three really weak teams in the east and four really weak teams in the west, but the Western teams have identified themselves very, very plainly right away. And that also kind of saps a little bit of the interest out of it. And if you're in Arizona, Calgary or Vancouver, which is almost half of the Pacific Division, your season is basically finished. They both have tremendous holes. Sorry, all three of those teams have to gain about,

have to gain 10 more points than expected just to be in the playoff conversation. That's really rough. I don't know what you can do there to generate a lot of excitement. Yeah. Yeah, you were saying that you look at the, you look long and hard of the senators and you don't really know what to make of them. I can look at those three teams and make pretty clearly what they are at this point. Exactly.

Which is sad and possibly slightly unkind. Yes, yeah, a little bit of both. Okay, which team are you more worried about the predators or the stars? Tricky. Both of them are real conundrums. I think I'm probably more worried about the stars. although I'm not particularly worried about either one of them. I think the ship has been righted in Nashville already.

I don't know what the sort of teething struggles were there, possibly adjustment time for Sub-Benz, who has to be an enormous part of that defense corps for them to succeed. They swapped out their most important piece and obtained a new player who is now their most important piece. That's a big adjustment. Whereas in Dallas, I feel like the problem is more just injuries, You know, there, I was joking earlier with how, you know, single injuries don't, don't derail an entire season.

But then, you know, you look at the way those injuries have piled up, they've lost six forwards. Like, weighted by man games lost, they've lost something like two and a half seasons, full seasons of players already. It's the, you know, that's, that's very, very tough. So, you know, I don't think Nashville has those sorts of systematic problems. You know, you're worried about coaching problems, about how people aren't challenging, but how systems don't mesh. five, ten games and that fixes up, whereas, you know, in the stars you've already got two or three people who are done for the year.

You know, that's not something that you can easily fix. And Jim Nill is one of the better GMs in the league, I think, but you can't just pull rabbits out of a hat week after week after week. And he doesn't have as many assets to deal with as he did in years previously when he did things like give them up for Chris Russell for a playoff from last year.

No, I'm not, I wouldn't have made that specific trade, although I don't disagree with the sentiment. I think the stars were in a place where they were, where they should be loading up for run. Right. And now they're, you know, it constrains them. Yeah. Well, it's weird seeing them.

I think they're 19th and 5-1-5 goals so far this year. And it just, we would have obviously predicted them to be top five, if not, if not top one. But I think that obviously a lot of that has to do. I mean, losing Yanmark, Ekin, Sharp, Spetsza, and Hamski, I mean, I feel like those those would be like five of the best six or seven forwards on a team like the Canucks. So it's crazy. It's crazy that they're losing those guys and still have, you know, they're still competitive and we're still seeing sort of flashes of that upside

just because guys like Sagan and Ben are so dynamic that there's going to be an odd night here or there where they can just generate four or five goals themselves seemingly. But they definitely don't have that just kind of like with the Rangers where they just roll four lines and there's never any let up. I mean, now all of a sudden you're seeing inferior players playing on their bottom six. So that's a bit concerning to me. But I think the predators are interesting. I think that, you know, heading into the year,

we would have expected their goal tending would be their biggest drawback. And it's been arguably their most consistent, reliable thing. I think their ninth in 5-1-5s8 percentage as a team this year. And it's weird seeing that sort of keep them afloat in the early going. So hopefully those goals start coming and they start relying a bit less on guys like Renee. I have to say that that surprised me too. and that was the kind of, the way that they started their season, it could have easily sunk him completely if Rene had had

the kind of stretch which he can have. So there's been, I don't know if you would call it good fortune, but it's rare to see, you know, all of these luck, or should say, variance things, you know, they generally don't have anything to do with one another. So you don't often get all of the troubles all at the same time, although, you know, every now and again you do and you, For instance, to what happened to the HABs last year, you know, price got hurt, which is extremely unfortunate.

And then a whole bunch of other things just went south really fast. And then, you know, you watch them like implode like a tanker where you suck the air out of them. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, the reason why, I don't know, I just, I don't even know what to discuss at the west at this point, because the obvious stuff would be like, okay, are the Black Hawk's this good? And I feel like anyone that just takes five seconds to look at their numbers would say, no, they're probably not this good. I mean, Corey Crawford right now, if he keeps playing this way, then he'll have like the best gold ending season ever, I think. So like, I think that eventually that, even though I do think

the world of him, he'll eventually come back down earth a bit and they will stop winning at this pace. And then you have teams like the sharks and blues who have been a bit pedestrian in the standings, but all of their underlying numbers suggest that they've been unlucky and just based on where they've been at years past, they'll turn that around eventually and be atop the standings again. So I don't know. Is there like anything we're missing out west? terms of interesting, surprising storylines so far? But I don't know how many people are going to be surprised by Winnipeg this year, but they're

going to win a bunch of games. They're already winning a bunch of games. And they, for instance, Patrick Lina amazingly has somehow not quite reached the same hype as a handful of other rookies this year. But he's going to be forcing his way into those sorts of conversations. And, you know, I did not think I would see a player who reminded me even a little bit of Alex Ovechkin in my entire lifetime, and already Lina is doing that for me.

The same stylistic way he plays the incredible shot. He doesn't hurt, of course, that he's the same-handedness as Ovechkin, and so he's shooting from exactly the same spot on the power play. But you see that shot, and it's like, you know, when you see your friend in the mirror, and then you look up close and you realize it's not your friend, that kind of slightly eerie reminiscence. And then you look at the rest of their forward depth, especially,

and you see that they have a whole pile of lower-level prospects who are maybe only just a little bit below the top tier of prospects. And then when you have three or four guys like that, you can start to develop that four-line attack we were talking about. And then, of course, they've just been rejuvenated with Truba coming back in. Who knows how long he'll stay there. And that looks like a trade-me contract. But there's a lot of strength in that roster.

especially now that they're not playing public on a nightly basis. You know, there's not that many holes in the roster left, even if you don't know the names of those guys. I think you'll know a lot of their names pretty soon. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, you know, some of the guys like Linae, of course, and Wheeler, who people keep saying is underrated,

but I feel like eventually he'll either be properly rated or overrated just because, you know, it's like the whole, like, Louis Erickson thing, for example, it's like everyone just keeps saying this guy's underrated, underrated. If we all think he's better than most people think he is, then maybe just most people think that he's really good. But, you know, and then like guys like Nikola Eelers, for example,

and they've drafted high up in the draft and went for high upside, high-scale guys. But I think the surprising thing to me is, is the emergence of Mark Schifley. You know, he was seventh overall pick and he had good major junior numbers, so it's not necessarily one of those things, like where this guy come from.

But I just, early in his career, I just didn't really think that he had this sort of upside. But, I mean, basically since like halfway point of last year, he's well over. a point of game and he just looks like a dominant two-way force out there. So I think that his emergence as well into sort of an upper echelon guy down the middle is huge for them because that is one position where they desperately needed someone. I agree.

And there's no question that Chisley fits the bill. And he's been within the fan base, he's been questioned endlessly. And, you know, there's no, there's a certain style of player that somehow just inspires confidence that makes people say, oh, you know, we'll be fine. And shyfully hasn't played like that, at least nine years past, until this year. But, you know, but then you look at the way he produced last year, and even the year before that, if you look at his on-ice results, especially if you dig a little bit deeper than just how many he personally put him in the net,

it's not, you know, it's sort of don't call it a comeback territory. He's always been steady. And, of course, the other thing, too, is that he was played very defensively. He was a kind of, you know, if I was given, votes, I would have put him maybe second or third in my Selke ballot last year. I thought he had a tremendous year defensively, but he wasn't even in the Selkie conversation, which is unusual. And of course, you know, it's a little bit difficult for me when people say, oh, you know, when is she actually going to start producing? And then also be shouted down when you suggest that

actually maybe his defensive numbers are excellent because he was being deployed in an extremely defensive way. Right. So the, you know, and you see the same thing. There's a handful of players who do this, you know, they have particular skill sets that endear themselves to coaches. And so they start getting more and more defensive deployment after being previously hyped as offensive talents. You know, the band of dad in New York, for instance, is doing incredible work defensively for them this year. But he was never treated as, as like a shutdown center. He was never treated as a two-way guy. He was, you know, he was brought into the league with this sort of fanfare about flash and dash, however truthfully that, however reasonably. So there's,

you know, those sorts of swings can happen where coaches can change their mind about how they're going to deploy a player. And that can be quite a bit faster than to change people's minds. So they can change their own minds quite a bit faster than fan bases will change their minds for instance. Yep. Yeah, completely agree. Micah, let people know where they can follow you, where they can look for your snazzing you charts, and how they can help support your work if they feel so inclined. So you can find me compulsively on Twitter all day every day, which is not so strange.

It's my job now. And so the handle is at ineffective math. It's an old joke about how I couldn't get a job as a mathematician, all one word. And so all of the work I do for the public I put on my website, which is hockey viz.com, h-S-K-E-Y-V-I-Z.com. And to my great pleasure, my primary source of income is subscribers who get early access to charts and early access to predictions.

And so you can sign up at my Patreon campaign, which is patreon.com slash hockeyviz. And there's links all over my Twitter and all over my website if you want to catch it out later. So there's all sorts of new, crazily colored visuals every day for those who like such things to check out.

Absolutely. Yeah, I can't encourage people to do so, to follow and help out enough. And we'll make sure to get you back on the PDOCS. I think a good plan is somewhere around the midpoint of the season, maybe around the All-Star break, and we'll do a second look at maybe where we went wrong, where we went right during this discussion. So it'll be

some of the point to. Cool. Thanks again. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure every time. We'll chat soon. Take care. The Hockey P.D.O.cast With Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash hockey pdiocast.