More photos » Matt Slocum - AP

Over the last decade, Sergei Gonchar was on the ice for the highest percentage of his team's PP goals in any single season.

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I thought this was an interesting list - players who were on the ice for the highest percentage of their teams' power-play goals.  Clearly power-play usage has changed over the years - Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr went on the ice for every PP and didn't come off the ice until the Bruins scored or the penalty was over.  Brian Leetch is probably the last player to have been used in this manner.

The list over the last decade is somewhat more defense-heavy:

It was really only a small number of coaches during a short period of time who kept a small number of truly dominant players on the ice for the entirety of every PP.  Indeed, eight of the 20-highest percentages of all time are from Harry Sinden (as coach and GM) keeping Esposito and Orr on the ice at all times.

More photos » Gregory Smith - AP

10 months ago: Atlanta Thrashers left wing Ilya Kovalchuk (17) of Russia, looks up at the clock during a time out against the Washington Capitals near the end of the third period of an NHL hockey game at Philips Arena, Tuesday, April 7, 2009 in Atlanta. The Capitals won 4-2. (AP Photo/Gregory Smith)

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Tyler's excitement about the Kovalchuk deal notwithstanding, New Jersey gave up a lot in this deal.  The Devils do win the deal in 2009-10 - a few months of Kovalchuk, including the playoffs, is worth more than Johnny Oduya and Nicklas Bergfors will contribute this season.  As far as I can tell from sports books that haven't been updated overnight, the Devils jumped from 12-1 odds to win the Stanley Cup to 6-1, which is a big improvement, but still behind Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Jose and Washington.

There should be no question that the Devils lose this deal in the future.  Oduya is signed at market value, but Bergfors is an RFA at the end of the season and will get signed at a large discount.  I suppose Cormier was going to be a headache in New Jersey, but the inclusion of a first-round pick on top of that seals the deal for Atlanta.  The Thrashers probably pick up two wins for free in 2010-11 as a result of this deal, with more wins in the years beyond that.

I suppose it would make a lot of sense if Kovalchuk was the best player in the league, but the stats don't really support that:

Kovalchuk 09-10 @ 5v5

Quality of Competiton: 10th on his team
Corsi Relative to Teammates: -3.6 shots per 60
Offensive Zone Faceoffs: 49.4%

Kovalchuk 08-09 @ 5v5

Quality of Competiton: 11th on his team
Corsi Relative to Teammates: +1.4 shots per 60
Offensive Zone Faceoffs: 45.0% (Atlanta had a horrendous number of D-zone faceoffs last year, so this is actually sheltered.)

Kovalchuk 07-08 @ 5v5

Quality of Competiton: 11th on his team
Corsi Relative to Teammates: -1.0 shots per 60
Offensive Zone Faceoffs: 49.1%

Bottom line: Kovalchuk has not played good two-way hockey.  He starts out in the opponent's end a lot against relatively weak competition, generates a lot of offensive opportunities as a result, but gives it all back at the other end of the ice.  He is a talented shooter, and brings a lot of value to the power-play, but he isn't Henrik Zetterberg.  A lot of the gain for New Jersey hinges on using Kovalchuk more appropriately than in Atlanta, and Jacques Lemaire is the guy to pull off such a miracle - but it certainly seems like this deal has a lot of downside for the Devils.

via torontoist.com Who is Vaclav Nedomansky?

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Tom Tango keeps reminding me of this, and he's right: why do we only count regular season goals in a player's career total?  Why don't playoff goals - against tougher competition - count?  And why do we only count NHL goals? 

Well, here's what happens if we count professional goals.  I drew the line above the AHL - otherwise Garry Unger ends up with 653 goals because of some ridiculous seasons in British hockey.  This revised goal-scoring table includes regular season and playoff goals from the NHL, WHA, Russia, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as all international tournaments of consequence: the Summit Series, the Canada Cup, the World Cup, the Olympics since 1998 and the World Championships.  A few players move around quite a bit:

Gretzky, Howe and Bobby Hull obviously stand out.  You can argue whether Howe and Hull's achievements approach Gretzky's given their time in the WHA, but you can also question Gretzky's scoring relative to Jagr's given that the NHL reached offensive peaks when he set the single-season scoring records.

It's interesting to see some Europeans - Jagr, Kurri, Selanne, Bondra, Stastny - move up because of their overseas accomplishments.  But the real reason I generated this list was to see if there was an extremely-talented goalscorer who slipped below the radar, and I found him at #30.  Vaclav Nedomansky scored 125 goals in the NHL, 138 in the WHA, at least 235 in the Czech league, and 67 goals in the World Championships, but if we only looked at his six-year career in the NHL, we'd barely notice.

More photos » Alex Brandon - AP

Buffalo Sabres' goalie Ryan Miller center, and Toni Lydman, right, from Finland, watch a pass go to Washington Capitals' Alex Ovechkin which he put in for a goal in the first period of an NHL hockey game in Washington Friday, April 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

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If I had a statistical question, would I email it to John Buccigross?  Well, someone did:

"John, What do you think are Alex Ovechkin's chances of breaking Wayne Gretzky's career goals record?"

John does a little thought experiment and comes up with this progression for Ovechkin:

In other words, not only can Ovechkin score that 895th goal to pass Gretzky, but he could also plausibly score another 114 goals after that!  Let's look at that progression in another way - where Ovechkin's annual goal total would rank all time at each age: (projections in bold)

So Ovechkin, whose seasonal goal total has ranked an average of 10th at ages 20-24, will post totals in the top three by age in 12 of the next 16 seasons.  Not surprisingly, this is unheard of in the history of the NHL - players get injured, decline, or play in other professional leagues.  Let's look at how some top scorers ranked at various ages:

Basically, careers are incredibly unpredictable - nobody plays 82 games a year from age 20 to age 40.  And players who play at a very high level at a young age tend to not sustain that level of play until they're 40: at age 24 - Ovechkin's current age - Dale Hawerchuk ranked 3rd in goals, Michel Goulet 6th, Pierre Turgeon 7th, Jimmy Carson 8th and Pat Lafontaine 10th.  In fact, nine of the top ten goal-scorers through age 24 had already scored 50% of their career goals (Jaromir Jagr being the lone expection.)

So, to answer the reader's question: I believe that there is presently no significant likelihood that Alex Ovechkin finishes his career with 894 goals.  He needs to display an uncommon level of durability for the next decade, and not just lead the league in goal-scoring, but do so by such a wide margin that he scores as much as Gretzky, Hull or Lemieux did in an era with vastly higher offensive levels.  No player has ever dominated the NHL in that way - even Gretzky's peak lasted only six years, and by age 27, he was no longer durable, and he was no longer guaranteed to lead the league in scoring.  Clearly 650 goals is not out-of-the-question - just not 900.

More photos » DARRYL DYCK - AP

about 1 month ago: Vancouver Canucks' Ryan Kesler celebrates after scoring against the Minnesota Wild during the third period of an NHL hockey game in Vancouver, British Columbia on Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Darryl Dyck)

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I just updated the 2007-08 and 2008-09 Quality of Competition rankings on behindthenet.ca, and I wanted to see what three years worth of combined statistics tell us about tough matchups.  The top 25 in Corsi-based Quality of Competition are shown below - I only included players who played regularly each season, and finished in the top 150 in the league overall in QoC:

A lot of familiar names here: defensive forwards who played together like Madden/Pandolfo and Niedermayer/Pahlsson/Moen; first defensive pairings like Lidstrom/Rafalski, Keith/Seabrook and Phillips/Volchenkov; and top defensive players like Willie Mitchell, Jan Hejda and Mikko Koivu.  For the most part, these are also guys who started out in their defensive zone a lot, and suffered on their Corsi shot totals as a result.

One guy who stands out is Ryan Kesler - he started in his own zone as often as anyone else on this list, and the Canucks still managed to generate a much better shot differential when he was on the ice than when he was off.  This is also a testament to the defensive skills of Sami Salo, Alex Burrows and Willie Mitchell, who've frequently been Kesler's linemates in these tough situations.  Vancouver might not have the most famous shutdown unit in the league, but they certainly have one of the best.

More photos » Alex Brandon - AP

Maxim Afinogenov is really excited. Why? He just scored the tying goal.

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Leverage is a concept that gets used a lot in baseball - it's essentially the probability of winning at a given point in a game.  In hockey, unlike baseball, teams are awarded a point for losing, so leverage actually captures not winning percentage, but the expected number of points a team can expect in the standings given the score and the time remaining in the game.  Here's what the leverage looks like for 2005-09:

And here's what the same data looks like for 2001-03:

What I want to draw your attention to is the difference between the two charts.  In particular, there is a significant leverage difference in tie games:

Basically, the "loser point" has completely changed third-period incentives.  Giving up a tie-breaking goal in the last five minutes of the game is now approximately one quarter point more costly than it was before the lockout, while scoring that same goal is worth one quarter point less than it was before.  NHL teams are obviously aware of these incentives, and it should come as no surprise that a record high percentage of games have been tied at the end of regulation time this season.  I know of no other sport that works like post-lockout hockey - as long as teams don't decide to game system any more than they already do, it can probably continue.  But the incentive is to play for the tie whenever you can, and the system can easily fall completely out of its unsteady equilibrium.

More photos » Paul Beaty - AP

Brent Seabrook draws the toughest matchups in the league.

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I hope you're familiar with the concept of "Quality of Competition" at behindthenet.ca.  (You can find a short primer on it here.)  At any rate, I wanted to post the rankings for defensemen on every team through Saturday's game.  This list uses opposition Corsi +/- (shot differential) rather than goal differential - shot total is less-influenced by luck, so it gives a better indication of how a player has performed:

One thing I like about "Quality of Competition" is that if you don't watch a team very often, you can get a quick sense of how that team's players are used.  Did you ever wonder if Mike Green's ice time is a little soft?  Did it seem weird that Rob Scuderi - who has 18 goals over all levels of hockey since he started college - was a good free agent pickup?  Were you concerned about who would pick up the slack after Kurt Sauer was injured in Phoenix?  Well, probably not that last one - but Quality of Competition gives you insight into the first two...

There are some imperfections in the system - it's difficult to compare across teams, and even within teams, players who have a shutdown role but also play so many minutes that they're bound to face some weaker competition, like Jay Bouwmeester, are underestimated.  But by and large, as long as a player plays regularly, this is a reliable system to compare players on the same team - I'm interested to hear if any of the #1 and #2 defensemen above are misevaluated in terms of their usage this season.

More photos » Heikki Saukkomaa - AP

Rickard Wallin hasn't scored this season, so I don't have a photo of him scoring...

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I'm sure it sounded good when Kevin McGran wrote this about Leafs forward Rickard Wallin, but doesn't it seem like he's leaving out part of the story?

"Wallin has been a disappointment since signing from Sweden, and hasn't scored since the pre-lockout era."

First of all, Rickard Wallin has scored a few times since the lockout ended.  In 204 regular season games over three years in Sweden and one in Switzerland, he has 60 goals.  Conservatively, that rate would translate to ten goals in a full NHL season.  During his NHL career, Wallin has averaged about one shot-per-game, so ten goals would correspond to a 12% shooting percentage. 

But, so far this season - his first in the NHL since the lockout - Wallin is 0-for-39 shooting.  That's a terrible stretch.  But over the last seven seasons, fully 54% of NHL players have had an 0-for-39 stretch.  Overall, they've shot 8.6%.  These numbers include defensemen, so it overstates to some extent how many players go 0-for-39, but it also underestimates the true talent shooting level of the forwards in this group, which is above 10%.

So there are two issues here: 1) it was more than a little bit deceptive to tell us that Rickard Wallin didn't score during the four seasons following the lockout; neither did John Tavares!  If a player isn't playing in the NHL, it's hard to hold that against him; 2) the fact that Wallin hasn't scored so far this season tells us very little about his shooting abilities.  If we thought he was a 12% shooter, maybe he's really a 10% shooter.  But we really only expected 10 goals from him in an 82-game season, and he's about 4 goals behind that pace - not yet a failure.

More photos » Elise Amendola - AP

It has been a few years since these guys were on the ice for real...Memories tend to get hazy...

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On Hockey Day in Canada, Ron MacLean asked Paul Henderson for some comments on his line in the 1972 Summit Series - with Bobby Clarke and Ron Ellis.  Henderson replied: "We showed that you didn't need to be an All-Star to play in that series."  Henderson continued: "I don't think any of the three of us were All-Stars at that point."

The only problem is: Clarke had just played in the last three All-Star Games; Henderson had played in the 1972 All-Star Game, and Ellis, already a bit old for an NHL player during that era at 28, had played in four All-Star Games, including, most recently, the 1970 game.

Indeed, among the 28 players who played in at least one game in the 1972 series, most were "All-Stars":

The second line shows the percentage of games played in 1972 by players who were All-Stars in each season.  All 28 players on the Summit Series roster played in at least one All-Star Game between 1970 and 1974.  In fact, there's no evidence that you could play for Canada at the highest levels of international hockey without being an NHL All-Star.  Other than that, Henderson is completely correct.

More photos » Frank Gunn - AP

Mario Lemieux posted some of the all-time best individual power-play performances.

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Last Monday, I looked back at the best power-plays of the last 45 or so years, and it turned out to be dominated by teams from the mid-to-late-1970s.  While I'm as big a fan of the WHA days as anyone else, I thought it might be more interesting to look at top power-plays of more recent vintages.  Again, adjusting for the league-wide PP average:

(I excluded the strike-shortened 1994-95 season - Chicago, Detroit and Quebec all cracked the top 10, but the 48-game season allowed teams to reach extremes they otherwise couldn't.)  Overall, this is a very good group of teams - most of them finished first in their respective divisions.  Though none won the Stanley Cup, two were cup finalists, and two others made it to the semi-finals. 

My vote for the best PP actually goes to the #2 team, the 1995-96 Penguins.  The Pens spread the power-play point work around a bit, but Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr and Ron Francis combined for 184 power-play points.  Lemieux, in particular, was on the ice for 102 of Pittsburgh's 109 power-play goals, the best percentage-wise showing of his career.