10 Interesting (To Me) Stats For This Week - February 17
Welcome back to another week of ’10 Interesting (To Me) Stats’. This week, we’re going around the league answer one question: how are teams or players creating their offence, by carrying the puck in or dumping the puck in? Both approaches have their merits, so let’s see who does what.
All this is taken from tracking data collected by All Three Zones and all of it is at 5-on-5. For individual players, the cut-off is 100 tracked minutes for forwards and 110 minutes for defencemen.
1 – The Macro
Generally, teams that can score well are able to create offence both by carrying the puck in and by dumping the puck in – of the eight teams that are above the league average by both scoring chances off carry-ins and off dump-ins, five of them (Colorado, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Washington, Toronto) are top-10 by 5-on-5 scoring:
Columbus isn’t far off, sitting 12th in scoring, with St. Louis and New Jersey being the clear exceptions. It isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing as Tampa Bay has the second-lowest rate of scoring chances off dump-ins but sits second in 5-on-5 scoring, while Ottawa is below-average in both areas and sits fourth. However, unsurprisingly, teams that are good at creating offence in multiple ways are often finding a lot of offensive success.
2 – A Pro’s Pro
Drilling down the individual level, there is one name that stuck out immediately, and it’s how well Washington succeeds at creating scoring chances both by carrying the puck in and dumping the puck in off entries by winger Aliaksei Protas:
We mention Protas because over the last season and a half, he’s been on the ice for the eighth-most goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (minimum of 1250 minutes) and is inside the top-20 for points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5, ahead of names like Mark Scheifele and William Nylander. Protas’ versatility has helped turn him into one of the top offensive wingers in the NHL.
3 – I’s the Byfield
Not far from what Protas has done this year in the stats we’re focusing on is Quinton Byfield out of Los Angeles. While Protas has created more scoring chances per 60 minutes off both carries and dump-ins than Byfield, the young Los Angeles centre is not too far behind:
Of course, the big difference is that this year alone has seen Washington score 1.45 more goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 with Protas on the ice than Los Angeles has with Byfield on the ice, and over the last season and a half, that gap is about 1.1 goals per 60 minutes. This is one of those cases where the versatility of the player hasn’t translated to team success offensively, and it’s an area where more digging would be necessary.
4 – Bratt Winter
As mentioned earlier, one of the exceptions to a team creating well in both areas but not scoring well overall is the New Jersey Devils. As such, it isn’t a big surprise that they have a player with high scoring chance rates both off carries and dump-ins, at a rate comparable to other wingers with top marks in both areas who are getting a lot of goals with them on the ice, but with a low on-ice goal rate:
Those other three forwards are averaging 3.84 goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 between them, and the lowest is Protas at 3.27. Conversely, Bratt is in a distant fourth place at 1.97 goals per 60 minutes. It is why there is hope for a big turnaround from him (and the Devils) down the stretch, but the runway is getting very short.
5 – Grit Factor
Staying with New Jersey for a second, they have a forward whose carry-ins are resulting in 5.27 scoring chances per 60 minutes at 5-on-5. In our entire sample of 274 forwards, that rate ranks 14th overall, or around the 95th percentile. It isn’t Jack Hughes, Nico Hischier, or Timo Meier, but rookie Arseny Gritsyuk:
For comparison’s sake, a few names with similarly high rates of chances on carry-ins with roughly league average scoring chances on dump-ins are Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid, and Kyle Connor. Perhaps there is a reason New Jersey is scoring 3.3 goals per 60 minutes with Gritsyuk and Cody Glass on the ice at 5-on-5 against a team average of 1.89.
6 – Fortune Does Not Favour the Bolduc
Earlier, we saw that the Montreal Canadiens are a team that create well both off carry-ins and off dump-ins, but not all players create the same. In his first season with the Habs, winger Zachary Bolduc has been one of the more dump-in-reliant players in the league:
Bolduc has the ninth-highest rate of scoring chances off dump-ins among the 274 forwards in our sample, but the seventh-lowest rate of scoring chances off carries. It is a tough way to create offence simply because the rate of scoring chances off dump-ins is much lower, so if the team wants to create more goals with him on the ice, they need to figure out how to do it with the puck on his stick as he crosses into the offensive zone.
7 – Hertl Power
When we looked at what each team does, the Vegas Golden Knights stood out as a team that (relatively speaking) creates a lot more off dump-ins than off carries, and none of their forwards embodies that more than Tomáš Hertl:
It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that, as we saw with Bolduc, the Golden Knights aren’t creating a lot offensively with Hertl on the ice at 2.34 goals per 60 minutes against a team average of 2.61. He has often been asked to carry the third line with their top stars playing on lines ahead of him, so that matters, but seeing that offence turn around over the final 6-7 weeks would be a big deal for him and the Golden Knights.
8 – Welcome to Puck-Burg
Sometimes, I point players out because they are key players on a specific team, or because there might be a skill change for a young player that is worth noting. Here, we are highlighting Nashville defenceman Nick Blankenburg because I truly have no idea what the hell is going on:
Not only is Nashville getting more scoring chances off Blankenburg’s dump-ins than any other team from any other defenceman in the league, but he sits 15th out of 161 defencemen for chances off carry-ins. Unfortunately, it hasn’t led to a lot of goals yet (2.07 per 60 minutes, or nearly a half-goal less than league average), but it makes him someone to keep an eye on after the Olympic break.
9 – Yeah, That Makes Sense
Falling into the ‘Key Players on a Specific Team’ column is Quinn Hughes for the Minnesota Wild. The funny part isn’t that the Wild – and Vancouver Canucks before – are/were getting a pile of scoring chances off his carry-ins, it’s that those teams are/were only getting chances off his carry-ins, as they have zero chances off his dump-ins this season:
That Hughes leads all defencemen for team chances off the player’s carry-ins makes a lot of sense, but it’s just funny to see them with 0.0 chances off his dump-ins. It might be because the tracking data has him with 51 attempted entries, and 50 of them are carry-ins or pass-ins. Just an unbelievably special player who is at the top of the heap for offensive defencemen.
10 – Offensive Avalanche
Watching the men’s Olympic hockey preliminary games, one player who really stood out to me on Team Canada was Devon Toews. While Cale Makar is the much more gifted player offensively, Toews just looked very steady while being able to create offence as well. Looking at the dump-in/carry-in data for the NHL season, that is something reflected there, too:
It should be noted Toews skates more than half his 5-on-5 time with Nathan MacKinnon on the ice, so creating offence in both areas while getting so much time with an MVP candidate will help the scoring chance numbers. All the same, that kind of versatility helps make that Colorado top defence pair such a productive duo.
Until next week.
