Throughout the season, I'm going to be looking at the Avs numbers compared to their 2006-2007 near miss of a season. I'm still a bit behind on getting all my statistical ducks in a row, but I do have a few numbers ready for crunchin'.
After three games, the Avs have 4 points, tied for 4th best in the league (last year, they were 14th). At the current pace, they would end up with 109 points for the season, a 14 point increase over the previous year. Yay, team.
So far (and despite getting shutout by Chris Mason), the Avs have 10 goals, or 3.3 per game. That is good enough for a tie for 4th in the league, and puts them on pace for 273 goals on the year (6 more than last year), an essentially negligible change (2% increase). The high-octane offense of last year seems to be still running on all cylinders.
Unfortunately, we're still giving up the same number of goals as last year; right now, we're on pace for shaving just 1 goal off of the sad 247 we allowed last year. That's not so hot.
Curiously (and I'm sure largely thanks to a small sample size), we're taking less shots. Right now, the Avs are averaging 27.7 shots per game, 4 per game less than last year. That's a 13% dropoff. I imagine this number will normalize a bit as the season progresses.
On the other side of things, we're giving up 1.7 more shots per game (a 6% increase). 29.0 shots per game was bad enough for 13th in the league. 30.7 is even worse (23rd overall). I may be an optimist, but I think that number will drop down as our defensemen get a little more comfortable playing together. In fact, the SA have dropped in every game so far (34, 32, 26).
By next week, I should have data at hand to start looking at special teams and the all-important (and much-maligned) faceoff numbers.