Sunday, March 8, 2009

Ottawa Scoring

I looked up some stats to show the decline in Ottawa's scoring before and after January 1, 2008, to support my claim that is was primarily a decline in offence that caused their tumble in the standings over the last season and a half. Here are points per game stats for the key players on Ottawa:

Dany Heatley: 1.31 before, 0.93 after
Daniel Alfredsson: 1.21 before, 1.02 after
Jason Spezza: 1.37 before, 0.89 after
Mike Fisher: 0.71 before, 0.46 after
Chris Kelly: 0.47 before, 0.31 after
Wade Redden: 0.53 before, 0.33 after
Chris Phillips: 0.31 before, 0.21 after
Anton Volchenkov: 0.23 before, 0.17 after
Other top 4 defencemen: 0.45 before, 0.34 after
All other forwards: 0.32 before, 0.26 after

There was only one key player on Ottawa who had a scoring rate that improved since January 1, 2008. He went from 0.54 points per game to 0.56 points per game. What was his reward for reversing the trend? Getting traded for Columbus' backup goalie. My sympathies to Sens fans, because the future doesn't look particularly bright in Ottawa.
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4 comments:

Bruce said...

One question: When did you measure the "before" period? Clearly it ends on 2007 Dec 31, but when did it start? Beginning of 2007-08? Beginning of 2006-07? Beginning of each player's career as a Sen?

March 8, 2009 at 5:18 p.m.
The Contrarian Goaltender said...

Sorry for not making that clear in the post, the before period was 2006-07 and the first half of 2007-08, with the idea that then both the before and after samples would consist of roughly a season and a half worth of games.

March 8, 2009 at 7:35 p.m.
Bruce said...

Thanks, CG, that makes sense. Hey, you could start a website "Brian Murray Is A Fraud" and I could totally get behind it. That team has totally caved on his watch.

March 9, 2009 at 2:16 a.m.
Anonymous said...

TCG: Did you adjust the numbers to account for the overall decrease in scoring in the NHL resulting from the reversion to muck-and-grind hockey somewhere around the 60-game mark of the 2006-07 season (and officially in the 2007-08 season). To give you some frame of reference, I looked up how many point/game players there were in each season since the lockout (minimum of 60 pts or 60 games):

2005-06: 30
2006-07: 29
2007-08: 23
2008-09: 20 (projected)

Many of those drop-offs are so precipitous that they would easily exceed the expected reduction from less offense league-wide. But I just thought that should be included in the analysis.

Also, the blue-line talent bleed that the Sens have experienced over the last three seasons hasn't helped matters, either.

March 25, 2009 at 5:43 p.m.

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