How real is the Calgary Flames’ blazing-hot start?
The Calgary Flames hold leads in several key categories through what’s nearly the first six weeks of the NHL season.They have the best overall goal differential in the NHL at plus-27. They have conceded the fewest goals league-wide at five-on-five. They have more shutouts than any of their contemporaries, blanking teams at a disrespectful rate of 37 percent so far. They have also spent the most time playing with the lead.
It’s all added up to more points than any other team in the Pacific Division.
They also lead the NHL in that dreaded stat which combines shooting and save percentages to predict future outcomes with a proven unsustainable 1.037 PDO at five-on-five.
Now, it’s only natural that the crooked numbers the Flames have produced would spit out stats that would suggest a correction is coming. No team has finished with a PDO higher than 1.03 over the last five seasons, with the “most fortunate” of teams usual hovering around two percentage points above the theoretical median of 1.0.
It’s a safe bet, then, that the Flames will perform well below their current mark for the rest of the season.
Though in reality we didn’t need an analytic to tell us this.
Because history works too.
The most team shutouts for a single season in the NHL’s modern era belong to the 2011-12 St. Louis Blues, who survived 60 minutes without blemish 15 times with the combination of Brian Elliott and Jaroslav Halak.
At their current pace, the Flames — or Jacob Markstrom and Dan Vladar — would double that mark.
More pucks, on more nights, are set to find their way through Flames netminders. And that’s that.
Fortunately, what’s also predictive is that conceding a little more shouldn’t result in devastating outcomes. That’s because aside from the pristine .958 five-on-five save percentage Markstrom and Vladar have combined for while approaching the quarter pole, just about everything else we have seen from the Flames is highly repeatable.
That equal part contributing to the…
Source : yahoo
