2016-17 Midseason Rainbow Charts

As the title says, these are the midseason “Rainbow Charts” I released on twitter back in mid-January. Yes, I am putting them up on the blog just now, mid-February. I’ve been busy, yo.

Anyway, much like the original rainbow charts, these charts compare players against the results of their peers who have similar TOI. So a second pairing defender is being compared against the historical average of all second pairing defenders, not against his teammates.

By using standard deviations, the idea is to provide some context around usage, as often we get hung up on decimal places. Especially when looking at relative zone starts, the deviations are quite large, so it takes a lot to move a player outside of the “average” zone (the middle square).

Weighted Corsi is a combination of CF60, CA60 and Relative CF% standard deviations, weighted.

Click “Read More” to get to the charts. Ctrl+F will get you directly to your team if you don’t want to scroll through everything.

Individual Offensive Contribution Graphs (Through 11/16)

If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen a lot of charts about offense over the last few days. All of these graphs represent a player’s individual offensive contribution to their teams based on two stats.

First, is Individual Corsi For per 60 (iCF/60). This basically tallies all the shots on target, missed shots, and blocked shots a player has taken up until I pulled the data, and then turned it into a rate stat.

The second is Personal Shooting %, often just called Shooting %, which is the number of goals a player has, divided by the number of shots on goal they’ve taken.

The first chart (I’ll use Dallas as an example) shows just this year’s numbers.

As you can see, Roussel’s Sh% is really high and likely to come down, especially because his iCF/60 is lower than average. On the other hand, Sharp, Seguin & Spezza have Sh% within a normal range, and have really high iCF/60, so they could probably continue that pace.

Graph two is slightly different.

This shows how the player is doing vs their results over the last 5 years. I’ve excluded rookies because, well, they don’t have any data from the last 5 years. Here we can see Hemsky smack dab at average, indicating he’s doing exactly what he’s always done. Roussel is actually shooting less than he normally does, and both Spezza and Val are shooting a lot more. Klingberg’s shooting % is extremely deflated compared to his normal 5v5 number, which is a scary thought for the rest of the Central Division.

The most important thing to remember is that these graphs only tell you about offense. If you have a player who is sound defensively, but doesn’t take a lot of shots, they won’t look good on these charts.

Under the jump, I have all the teams in alphabetical order by abbreviation.

Your 2BL Top 10 Prospect Guide (2015)

If you’re like us, you don’t follow much amateur hockey, so while the draft is exciting it’s more of a spectacle than anything. With that in mind, we thought we’d take it upon ourselves to do some research on the top ten prospects and help our readers know what to look for when the worst teams step up to the mic on Friday night.

This “Top 10” prospect ranking is from TSN, because Central Scouting divides their prospect list into North American skaters and International skaters, with an entirely separate list for goalies. Also, we like it because Uncle Bob McKenzie has a good eye for talent, and the other very comprehensive list is ESPN’s, and well, do we really trust their hockey coverage? (No. No is the answer.)

Anyway, let’s kick things off, shall we?

 

source: TSN

 

Connor McDavid – C

Tyler Seguin’s Face Might Actually Be Made of Silly Putty

Let’s just say he’s pretty excellent at manipulating his own facial features. If you’ve watched any video of Tyler Seguin at all, you’ve probably noticed that he’s one of the more expressive faces in the NHL today. If you haven’t noticed that, well. I don’t know what to do with you.

Why this post then? Face appreciation, partly. (Listen, we appreciate his face.) But we’re mostly in this for reaction gifs, for those times in a twitter conversation when you’re beyond speech, and only Tyler’s face will really do. We provide this example:

One of roomie's friends says she dislikes avacodos because they are "crunchy and bitter." Girl…I don't know what you ate, but…

— Carolyn (@Classlicity) February 2, 2015

@Classlicity http://t.co/07QcVKzaU9

— Merrin (@merrinish) February 2, 2015

For this reason, we present the following gifs, helpfully broken up (in no particular order) by the situations in which you’d use the gifs.

TRIUMPH

source: fourthline

source: fucale