1C Day three: 5v5 Play/Defense
Same folks as in previous post, but now isolating play at evens, using advanced stats. All the stats are pretty familiar, and they?ve got their problems. Nik?s had convincing arguments against CF.QoC and zone starts, IIRC. I wonder how reliable Corsica?s numbers for scoring chances are for games nearly ten years ago, and that?d call xGF and KPO into question?
One less familiar stats were included to try to capture defensive play. KPO, or Keeping Pucks Outside, represents what proportion of Corsi against were NOT scoring chances. Some have said it can actually capture defensive ability, particularly for those stay-at-home types.
According to Original Six Analytics, 85% is about average, 83.5 is a Std Dev below, 87% is a Std Dev above, 82% is bad, 89% about as good as you can get (his distribution chart is for defensemen, but he says the pattern is the same for forwards).
Table:
Thoughts:
Standing out in a good way are Kopitar, Johansen, Barkov, and McDavid.
The latter two were teenaged rookies. That McDavid was so good without the puck so early isn?t a surprise. I did not know, however, that Barkov was such a natural defensive phenom.
So, that leaves Matthews in the company of rookies Toews, Tavares, Nugent-Hopkins, MacKinnon, and Eichel. Matthews has better xGF% and CF% than any of them. In fact, he?s the only one above 50% in both?
The first two positive standouts ? Kopitar and Johansen ? were in their 3rd seasons, and I?d suspect gameplay stats improve as talented high picks develop. All that about skill guys being so good that they don?t need to learn to play without the puck until the NHL. Corsica's stats don?t go back to Kopitar?s rookie year, but they do for Johansen. His rookie numbers were in line with Tavares?s above ? and Tavares?s were, by his 3rd season (11-12), nearly Kopitar?s. Toews, in 09-10, was up to a 60% CF/xGF in his third season...
Dare we hope Matthews follows Tavares?s path and turns in a Kopitar-ish two-way season at some point? Matthews?s impressive two-way performance is undercut, to some degree, by his only having to play one way for most of the season: his ZSR indicates how sheltered he was. On the other hand, he faced the same quality of opponents as Toews and Tavares, and the difference between Matthews?s CF% and theirs is about what folks say the ZSR difference would produce.
So? verdict here? He?s probably almost certainly a better 1C defensively than Stamkos, RNH, and MacKinnon but probably not as good as Barkov. About as good, defensively, as Tavares would make for a 1C I'd be happy with.
Last day at 1C tomorrow. Topic? Those single-number metrics (Game Score and GAR) and percentiles.