Colorado Avalanche: Worried Yet?

I agree with your conclusions, that the Avs are probably a bubble team that’s gotten some luck to help them this season.

I’m curious to know what effect coaching has on stuff like shots. If a coaching staff and a team play a system that try actively try and create more quality shots instead of quantity, then that would fit the data here, albeit an extreme case. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference at all, and the Avs really have been that lucky this season.

I find Anderson’s career average to be somewhat perplexing too. Of course small sample size is probably a large part of it, but as soon as he got out of Chicago his save % jumped by quite a bit. His career average is in line with others, but he showed tremendous improvement since going to FLA (again with the small sample size caveat).

Good analysis, as usual, Gabe. (P.S. I’m not as familiar with PDO as I would like to be. Do you have any old posts where you go over it in more detail?)

Every time I hear about the Avs wheels falling off, they hit a winning streak. Outside of a complete collapse in the last 14 games, the Avs are going to make the playoffs. Do I think they will go far? No…but the constant writing off of the team since October has me a bit perplexed

One thing that should really be factored into any breakout team’s performance is the depth of scoring. The reason the Avs have gone to the top and stayed consistently at the top is two-fold: goaltending (the “great unknown” is Anderson in the playoffs), and scoring depth. Whenever a young player has slumped, another has moved up and filled the void. Remember how hot Ryan O’Reilly and David Jones were out of the gates? Remember Brandon Yip’s emergence, coupled with the ebb-and-flow of Matt Duchene and the recent success of Chris Stewart? And now, Milan Hejduk and Paul Stastny, the Avs “old guard”, have heated up and gotten back into their old scoring paces. I think the make-or-break heading into the playoffs is Anderson’s performance. And as we’ve seen before, you never really know who’s going to shine in the playoffs.

I think this is a case of the numbers being looked at too much. Anyone can pick a few different things and attempt to put doubts in our collective heads. Or, maybe this is just a “Devil’s Advocate” situation. As far as shots given up on net, San Jose is near the bottom of the league as well, but look where they are. Yes, they have taken more shots than they have given up (unlike the Avs), but this is not necessarily a warning signal. How about the winning percentage of teams that have been out-shot in games this season? Only 3 of the 16 current playoff seeds have sub .500 records when giving up more shots in a game, and 2 of them would not even be in the hunt if they were in the West.

The question of your article is, “Worried Yet.” I think each fan has to decide for themselves how much faith they have in the team this season, but nobody can deny the improvements that they have made over last season, and hopefully this growth will continue. I am not aware of any realistic & rational fan that thinks the Avs are going to be on a cup run this season, but they are doing the right things to become contenders once again. Bringing up young talent from within instead of trying to pay for a championship is the formula that works, and that is what is happening. My vote would be for us to stop looking so much at the numbers all of the time, and enjoy it as a whole. Yes they have some things to work on, but they can be damn fun to watch right now. I like to think of these times as exciting, rather than trying to dwell on plugging every pinhole leak in the boat.

numerically, certainly the Avs are an outlier in most traditional metrics for hockey success, I agree. But I still wonder how much the Avs style of offense and defense causes the weird statistical output. The Avs have been incredibly strong in the first 2 periods of games, and usually are roughly comparable in shots and such. But they go completely passive in the 3rd when they usually have the lead, and rely on Andy to make lots of low-difficulty saves and try to clear the rebounds. Most teams try to sustain more pressure, the Avs appear to have zero interest in that. The only shots they’re taking are extremely high percentage — breakaways, etc. Thus, the final game numbers have inflated shots against, reduced shots for, etc.

I wonder what these stats would look like on a period by period basis. I’m betting they’re pretty normal the first 2 periods, and the 3rd is dramatically skewing the numbers.

Not that this is a great way to play or as sustainable as traditional hockey, but it at least might explain some things. And no, I’m not terribly worried.

Stats are great, but in the end they don’t determine wins/losses.

The Avs lost another one tonight! If only someone would tell them the goal isn’t to put pucks in the net and keep pucks out of your net. They just don’t believe in Corsi! Luckily the Canucks do, and Corsi’d the crap out of the Islanders tonight!

A few other goalies with similar variations from “average” include:

Kiprusoff
career: 0.914; season: 0.923;
No one is commenting on how Calgary should be lower in the standings.

Miller
career: 0.914; season: 0.931
People think Miller is the next “savior”… No one thinks he’s been “lucky”

Vokoun
career: 0.917; season: 0.929
They’re don’t do well even with great goaltending so it doesn’t matter.

I’m not saying the Anderson will continue to perform at 0.923 clip, just it isn’t fair to ONLY look at Anderson, there are plenty of more extreme cases. The difference works out to about 17 GA or about 3 wins (6 points), which means they would still be ABLE to make the playoffs if Anderson performed at his career levels.

Not worried. Concerned about the defense, yes, but not worried about the team as a whole.

The depth of scoring, the future franchise players that are developing early, the “I don’t care how you slice it, Anderson is one of, if not THE, best value goaltenders in the league” effect, and the fact that players who dog it get to watch from the pressbox are all reasons to be excited for this team. I expected them to hold down 13-15th in the West this season in a rebuilding year, at this point, it’s all gravy.

A team rides the percentages all yer every year. MTL did a couple of seasons ago, BOS did it last year. This year, it’s the Avs turn. When they regress next season – as BOS and MTL did previously – everyone will wonder why they’re “not working as hard” or if “success went to their heads”.

Truth is, they weren’t that good in the first place.

This is the first year for a plethora of players and the coaching staff. We may have had luck but after 69 games you’d think luck would change. If it is all luck, Stan Kroenke should take all his money and gamble in Vegas. He’d be a multi-billionaire according to these critics.

We are worried about the playoffs. But so is San Jose. We might get blown-out. But it’s a different season in April. We are young and inexperienced. They play so hard every night and the fact is they don’t know to give up. They keep fighting despite being outshot.

We weren’t expected to make the playoffs, so the season is a win for us. These critics refuse to eat crow in this regard because they were wrong. Just wrong. Critics turn to invective instead of facing that fact. Are we better on paper than the Flames or Dallas or St. Louis? Maybe not. We’ve played better, gotten luckier, and most importantly “won more games”. Be surprised this year, though Avs fans are not as surprised as you might think, and next year with 1-year of maturity for our rookies I expect more dominance.

Not to take anything away from Andy, because he really has been the backbone of the team this year and a major reason for the team’s success, but last night Budaj faced 39 shots and allowed only 3 goals, on par with a typical Anderson performance. This kind of game seems to be the face of the Avs this year, for good or ill. Will it take them deep into the playoffs? No, of course not. I don’t think anyone would tell you it will. Shots against is obviously an area in which they need to improve, but it’s a young club and it’s absolutely something they can learn. Next year, I’ve no doubt you’ll see better numbers.

It seems to me that EVERYONE looks at the Avs’ previous season as the true indicator for who they are. Lets not forget, they were a play-off team the previous year! It’s not as if Coach Sacco walked into a locker room bereft of talent. The whole team, the WHOLE team had a bad year in 08’-09’, not to mention injuries. So, maybe last seaon was the anomaly, not this one. Coach Sacco took a team that really wasn’t far away from a play-off berth to begin with, got a young infusion of talent that had something to prove, and has allowed them to make mistakes so that they learn to win. And no, I’m not worried. There are plenty of examples of teams in the play-offs who got outshot by a wide margin but still won. I just disagree with the tunnel vision that some seem to have with their view on the Avs’: That the previous season is the true indicator of where they have come from.

I also remember the Avs outshooting teams big time and losing by 2 goals.

I’ll take quality over quantity anytime

Great analysis. I’ve seen every Avalanche game last year (God help me) and this year to date. I can’t tell you why the Avs give up so many shots against vs what they take, yet still do so well. I do know that the team speed across all the forward lines is exceptional. So much so, that they generally take the offensive blue line with little to no resistance. As soon as the D tries to hold the blue line then Avs forwards are getting behind the D and creating problems. On the other side of the spectrum the Avs give up their own blue line with the lack of speed on their back end (Cumiskey excluded).

Anyway, James Mirtle made this same point in the first 1/3rd of the season and said the Avs couldn’t keep it up, but they have. The conclusion here is that with a large sample size of games things would even out and the Avs would be a bubble team. However, you also conclude that they are in trouble for the playoffs which is a much, much smaller sample size of games. You don’t need to maintain that performance over 82 games, just 4 to 7 games. In fact, a hot goaltender is the most effective player in the Stanley Cup run.

So, the law of averages isn’t going to bite the Avalanche in the playoffs. The law of averages mean even less in a playoff run. What I do know after watching last years team and this one is that everyone on the team believes they can win any given game no matter what the stats say.

Good article.

It will be interesting to see if the Avs can truly overcome being territorially dominated in the future.

The most positive thing about the Avs being lucky this year is that even if they are unlucky next year (likely with the possible turnover on defence) they can hope that this is (somewhat) offset by the potential of the players as they head toward their prime.

Your theory presupposes that there is only one way to achieve success. Pardon me if I do not follow the “conventional wisdom” here. Granted it would be great if the AVS gave up fewer shots, however, you cannot deny that even though the AVS are outshot on a regular basis that the majority of the time the shots that the AVS take are better scoring chances. Have you considered that getting your team into better scoring situations instead of throwing everything at the net can be an effective offensive strategy? What if they threw everything at the basket in basketball. You would send your centers and forwards near the basket and start chucking it from half court instead of working the ball and finding the teammate in the best scoring position. In hockey most teams throw everything at the net, nothing wrong with that. Who is to say that a team cannot be successful finding the best scoring option instead of taking bad angle shots and hoping for a rebound?