How Good Are The Minnesota Wild?

Please allow me to cover the responses of impassioned fans that don’t buy into this hocus pocus goobledeygock underlying numbers bunk.

BUT LOOK AT TEH WINS! YOUR NUMBERZ R WRONG! HOW DO YOU EXPLAN THE WINS IN THE COLUMN! FOR ALL YOUR MATHS ARE BOLONG TO US YOU DON"T BE RIGHT CAUSE THEY BEST TEAM IN STANDINGS!

Also, I certainly hope they bank enough points to finish 9th in the conference, and then don’t get lucky enough to draft an impact player at that position. The Oilers don’t need any help losing games now or in the future =).

Here’s a rebuttal from a Wild fan, a stats fan, and someone who has watched the games.

First, offensively, the top line is garbage at even strength. Specifically Mikko Koivu, who’s something like 9th on the team in ES goals and points and in the 200’s for NHL players in both categories. He is directly responsible for the poor play of Dany Heatley, who is a terrible fit with Mikko, but has much better ES production.

Yet they still don’t have a great PP, so you can’t say by any stretch they are putting up big numbers. Actually, if you look at ES scoring for the team as a whole pretty much the entire top nine is scoring goals fairly consistently. So there isn’t one or two players carrying the team but a VERY even workload.

Now, onto Fenwick which is becoming a running joke among Wild fans. Shots are a TERRIBLE way to measure a team’s abilities, at least overall. Yes the Wild are giving up a lot of shots and yes they aren’t getting many on goal. That is hugely irrelevant to their on ice success. Anybody who has watched the team can tell you that they are spending less time trapped in their end compared to the last two years.

The difference is that under coach Richards, the defense would give up odd man rushes like candy and they would get far better scoring opportunities. 2-on-1 and 3-on-1 compared to 5-on-5? Yeah, a little easier to score. In fact, if you look at our numbers under Lemaire, we were routinely in the top 5 teams for goals against yet between 10-20 in terms of shots against.

As a result, our goaltending was “bad” from 09-11. Our goaltending was “great” before 2009 and is “unsustainably great” right now. No, it’s the system. It’s the same reason Bryzgalov’s numbers spiked under Tippett, Mike Smith magically “found his game” under Tippett, and Kipper’s numbers were so much better before and after Mike Keenan. And many more examples of the same.

You’re using the Fenwick to compare a run and gun team like Chicago, who’s +6.5 in shot differential when tied, vs a (call it a trap I guess, though it’s 2-1-2) Minnesota team who’s -6.5 in the same scoring. Yet the teams are 1 and 2 in the West. Doesn’t correlate too strongly. I’ll be sure to pass along some more detailed analysis when I can get to it where I’d like to actually run the correlation strength of the Fenwick to standings and see how far off it really is.