What do Advanced Stats say about the Wild?
Eighteen games into the 2014-15 NHL season, the Minnesota Wild hold a 11-7-0 record. They are 7-1-0 at home and 4-6-0 away from the Xcel Energy Center.
What do the advanced statistics say about how the Wild may perform for the rest of the year? Do they suggest regression? Or perhaps improvement on the road?
Minnesota is currently first in the NHL with a Fenwick-for percentage (FF%) of 56.5. Rounding out the top three are the Chicago Blackhawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins with 56.2 and 54.5 respectively. All advanced stats used in this article are from Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com.
Fenwick is a calculation of shots+missed shots. It is similar to Corsi, except that Corsi also includes blocked shots. When the sample size is large enough, Fenwick can deliver a more precise depiction of a player or team’s impact on the game. Corsi’s inclusion of blocked shots involves a higher number of events, by virtue of including blocked shots, and may give more reliable information with a small sample size.
I would consider eighteen games into the season to be a large enough sample size to use Fenwick over Corsi.
PDO is a statistic that is a measurement of the combination of a team’s shooting percentage and save percentage. It should be noted that PDO does not stand for anything related to hockey, according to TSN hockey insider Bob McKenzie’s book, Hockey Confidential: Inside Stories From People Inside the Game. The fourth chapter of Hockey Confidential, “#fancystats,” sheds a lot of light not only on how the statistics work, but on the history behind them.
The idea around PDO is that a team with a PDO higher than 100 is somewhat lucky, or bound to regress. The inverse is also considered true; a lower PDO will eventually increase. Even though these assumptions discount the notion that a team may have a goalie with a high save percentage for the whole year, PDO can still be useful.
FF% and PDO can be good indicators on whether a team can continue performing at whatever level they are performing at. Last year the Colorado Avalanche had a FF% of 46.7; which was the fourth worst in the league. Their PDO was third highest, at 101.8. The Avalanche were eventually beat by the lower-ranked Wild in the first round of the playoffs. This year, the Avs are struggling, as they currently stand at 6-9-5.
A similar case was the Toronto Maple Leafs last year. They were in the playoff hunt until a 1-12-1 record after March 15th saw them fall to nine points behind the second wild card position in the Eastern Conference. Last year the Maple Leafs had a PDO of 101.3, which was the fourth highest in the league (just after Colorado). They also maintained a league-worst FF%, at 42.3. Toronto’s collapse came a little earlier than Colorado’s, but both teams eventually found the statistics catching up to them.
What about the road-woes? Minnesota has a slightly high PDO at home currently – 100.7, and a low PDO on the road – 97.9. Their FF%’s are strong at home and away. At home Minnesota’s FF% is 59.6. On the road it is 53.9.
Last year the Wild went 26-10-5 at home and 17-17-7 on the road. But last year their FF % on the road ranked 25th in the league at 46.9. Meanwhile their FF% in St. Paul was a more respectable 50.9, which was 18th in the league.
These statistics suggest that the Wild’s road woes are unlikely to continue this season.
If the Wild can improve on the road, look for them to turn into one of the premier teams in the league. Their home play over the course of last year’s regular season and playoffs was solid. They only won one road game in the playoffs, which makes it especially hard to make a run; particularly without home-ice advantage. Fortunately for the Wild, that road win did come in game seven against the Avalanche.