Phoenix Coyotes: Back to Being Unconvinced

If you haven't looked at the guerrilla scoring chances project this season, you don't know what you're missing. There are a few hundred games worth of recorded scoring chances out there, which puts us ever closer to knowing what NHL teams have known for 25 years.  The sites:

Montreal – Olivier Bouchard

Calgary – Kent Wilson

Edmonton – Dennis King (via Tyler Dellow)

Minnesota – Likens

Colorado – Scott Reynolds

Toronto – Name withheld because no one will admit to being willing to watch all of the Leafs games

For example, I pulled up 11 of Phoenix's games – four against Calgary, two each against Minnesota and Edmonton, and one apiece against Colorado, Toronto and Montreal, and looked at Phoenix's 5v5 scoring chances:

Godammit.  The numbers I had here before (PHX at 47.4%) were wrong. I double-counted the chances against in one game when I wrote this piece.  That will teach me to write at 1 o'clock in the morning.  When I wondered if "something else was going on," it was that I'm an idiot.

Anyways, those are some bad teams they're up against – only Colorado and Montreal are playoff teams, and if I wanted an opponent who I could outshoot, any of the six will do.  They get outchanced at about a 52% rate, so Phoenix is just slightly below-average in these games.  This system isn't perfect and it would be great if we had more than 11 games to work with.

Incidentally, this just shows you how incredibly important recording scoring chances can be.  Just for the record, here are each individual player's scoring chances for and against:

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