NHL Conference Standings as of January 3 (Click here to enlarge)

One of the most persistent complaints among hockey fans since the lockout has been the points system adopted which makes some NHL games worth two points in the standings while others are worth three. The League took a step toward rectifying a problem in that this season by adopting a new tiebreaker system which rewarded teams winning without the benefit of the shootout before going to other tiebreaker scenarios, but countless articles and comments from people have asked for changes to the way standings points are earned. In this article, we’ll use HockeyCSSI.com’s new Advanced Standings charts to look at several of these ideas, their benefits and drawbacks, and most importantly how they would change the standings.

What’s Wrong with the Current System?

Presently, the NHL standings are decided by points earned in playing games. A team earns 2 points for winning a game (no matter the means) and one point for forcing a game to overtime before ultimately losing. The problem many fans see with this system, aside from the mere existence of a shootout which is viewed as a pox on our fair game, is that it unfairly turns some games into three-point games while others are worth only two. A team which is exceedingly good at creating tied hockey games can not only directly benefit from a system which creates this, but also work to make other teams suffer from their division rivals earning more points than they otherwise would have. This system showed this fault in the 2007-08 season when the Boston Bruins made their way to the playoffs as an 8-seed despite having won two fewer games than the Carolina Hurricanes. The difference which gave Boston their playoff berth was that they took twice as many losses to overtime as the Hurricanes did. One could make a very good argument that the Hurricanes deserved to be the first-round opponent for the Montreal Canadiens that season.

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The Sharks scored four even strength goals last night.  These goals came against two different forward lines.

Cleary-Zetterberg-Filppula  and  Brunnstrom-Helm-Hudler

For all four goals the trio of forwards was on the ice well in advance of the goal being scored.  Lets take a closer look at the historical performance of theses line combos.

Frequent references will be made to my previous article where I solve the Red Wings problems with the perfect line combos.

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Red Wings and consistent line combinations have never really been something that go together.  And since the Wings have been shall we say inconsistent so far this season it seems like a good reason to try and rethink the lines and dig into some advanced stats.

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RedWings.Com’s Bill Roose released the official game notes for Tonight’s matchup between the Detroit Red Wings and St. Louis Blues. In those notes (among pages and pages of excellent information) is notification that the referees for this game will be Mike Leggo and Dean morton.

Let’s look at how each ref has done calling both teams, based on last season’s numbers:

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Head over to Winging It In Motown to read a recap of the Red Wings’ first month of the season through the Common Sense Scoring Index System.

One of the (somewhat) unsung leaders of the team is Valtteri Filppula, who has been playing very well both offensively and defensively for the team this year. As a whole, a lot of people still need to step up, but Detroit is headed in the right direction.  Give it a read and let us know your thoughts.

About a week ago over at Winging It In Motown, user Brion posted a Fanpost with a link to a Google Document he had created with the intent of tracking Red Wings goals for and against by time elapse in the period. ChuckyD, eager to prove just how awesome his event-scraping system is, volunteered to help out with that.

We contacted Brion and asked if he would mind if we grabbed this up and let the mad programmer get to work. Having finished the system, ChuckyD has created the Events By Time category under the Stats System top drop-down menu. Here’s a list of features that this tracker provides:

• Ability to track numerous hockey events, including: goals, penalties, shots on goal, missed shots, blocks, faceoff wins, giveaways, takeaways, and hits.
• Multiple time-interval choices. Break periods down into intervals of one, two, four, five, and ten-minute pieces.
• Regular season/playoff breakdowns, including regular season OT and playoff OT.
• Events for-and-against selected teams. Not only can you find out how many shots your team is getting between 12-14 minutes of the period, but you can track how many they give up as well.
• Ability to view by individual periods or combinations of game periods.

As a note, we have left empty-net goals off this tracking chart.

Give it a look; there’s a lot of good data there.  As always, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please let us know. If you don’t see a stat you want to see, or can think of a way to organize the stats differently, we’d love to hear it.  Thank you.