As mentioned a while ago, in a fit of off-season induced insanity, I decided to take a look at all the current Avs' career stats. I posted Part 1: Scoring a while back, and figured I'd continue sharing what I found (and what it might mean for the upcoming season) with Part 2: Time on Ice and Special Teams.
Now, finding the stats for Part 1 wasn't too bad. Every NHL player has an NHL.com profile with career GP, G, A, and Pts listed at the bottom. However, TOI is a much harder stat to come by. The NHL doesn't track career totals of that sort of thing, so I had to go through the NHL.com player stat area and find the data year by year for each player. And, much to my annoyance, I couldn't figure out how to make excel read the data as mm:ss, so I had to convert everything to just minutes. It was a pain, but it turned out pretty well in the end. I was able to add the totals, average them, and convert them back into mm:ss form.
I decided to look at three different TOI stats: Overall TOI per game, Power Play TOI per game, and Penalty Kill TOI per game. To get these numbers, I found total career REGULAR SEASON TOI in each of those areas (playoffs would have been added in separately, and it was hard enough already), then divided that number by career regular season GP. I also (just like last week) edited out anyone who has played less than 80 NHL games and all goalies.
Also, just like last week, I figured I'd start things off with a few trivia questions:
1) Who is the biggest workhorse on the team (besides the goalies)?
2) Which forward averages over 20 minutes a game?
3) Which player has spent more than 20% of his NHL career on the power play?
4) Who is our most effective player on the power play when it comes to scoring goals?
5) Which player's goal stats have benefited the most from his time on the man advantage?
6) Which defensemen are likely to be on the power play units?
7) Who averages more PK time, O'Reilly or McClement? And who has more short-handed goals?
8) Which two players average the LEAST amount of time on the Penalty Kill?
The answers to these questions (plus bonus Fun Facts!) after the jump...
Average Time on Ice:
Quincey: 21:18
Hejda: 21:15
Johnson: 20:55
Stastny: 20:12
Hejduk: 18:54
Galiardi: 18:30
Duchene: 18:20
Wilson: 18:07
Hunwick: 17:28
O'Brien: 17:00
Cumiskey: 16:38
O'Byrne: 16: 29
O'Reilly: 16:26
Mueller: 15:52
Jones: 15:30
McClement: 15:20
Kobasew: 14:35
Winnik: 14:22
Yip: 14:02
Porter: 13:29
Lindstrom: 12:07
Rissmiller: 11:59
McLeod: 11:13
Answer to Question #1: Kyle Quincey. I was just as surprised as you. I even went back and doubled checked my numbers, but it turns out, as far as average TOI is concerned, Quincey is a badass. With Hejda and EJ and the probable first pair this year, I doubt he'll be getting 21 minutes a night, but he'll still have a considerable amount of skating time on the second pair. On that note, his probable partner, O'Byrne, is most likely going to be getting much, much more than 16.5 minutes a game. Let's just hope sticking the Avalanche defenseman with the highest ATOI with the defenseman with the lowest ATOI turns out to be a good idea.
Answer to Question #2: Paul Stastny. After last week's Paul Stastny show, the fun continues. His stats continue to argue that SOS is the best forward we currently have. Over the course of his career, not even Hejduk comes close to Paul's 20:12 per game. In fact, if you just look at Hejduk's first five years, he only averaged 19:04 a game, more than a full minute under Stastny's workload. And even with Duchene and Radar coming in in '09-10 to help lighten that load, Stazz has still averaged 20:36 in those two seasons!
Another thing that surprised me about this list is that Gali averages more TOI than Dutch. I have a feeling that could change this year, but I wasn't expecting to see the newest Avs tweeter up so high. Nor was I expecting to see Mueller and Jones so low. I expect they'll each be getting 18 or more minutes a night on our top two lines, so with any luck (meaning they stay healthy), those numbers will rise this season as well.
Fun Fact #1 - Milan Hejduk has clocked 17,199:54 regular season minutes in an Avalanche jersey. Adding in playoffs, he's played 19,352 minutes, which is the equivalent of almost 2 WEEKS of non-stop skating. For comparison, Matt Duchene has only skated 3068 minutes in the regular and post seasons, which is just over 2 days.
Power Play:
****Player Name: Average Power Play Time on Ice, % of Total Time on Ice, Power Play goals, % of career goals scored on the PP, Average PP minutes between PP goals*****
Stastny: 3:43, 18.38%, 34G, 32.4%, 38 MIN
Hejduk: 3:38, 19.26%, 132G, 37.0%, 25 MIN
Mueller: 3:15, 20.48%, 16G, 33.3%, 45 MIN
Johnson: 3:13, 15.40%, 13G, 56.5%, 56 MIN
Quincey: 2:58, 13.92%, 3G, 27.3%, 183 MIN
Duchene: 2:57, 16.08%, 13G, 25.5%, 37 MIN
Kobasew: 1:56, 13.21%, 30G, 31.3%, 28 MIN
Lindstrom: 1:50, 15.17%, 5G, 38.5%, 30 MIN
Yip: 1:48, 12.83%, 7G, 30.4%, 26 MIN
Cumiskey: 1:47, 10.71%, 2G, 22.2%, 117 MIN
Jones: 1:30, 9.67%, 9G, 19.1%, 28 MIN
Porter: 1:29, 11.00%, 2G, 9.5%, 95 MIN
Hunwick: 1:13, 6.98%, 1G, 7.7%, 262 MIN
Galiardi: 1:03, 5.72%, 2G, 8.0%, 61 MIN
Wilson: 0:37, 3.41%, 1G, 16.7%, 79 MIN
O'Reilly: 0:36, 3.69%, 2G, 9.5%, 47 MIN
McClement: 0:29, 3.15%, 2G, 3.8%, 114 MIN
O'Brien: 0:23, 2.24%, 1G, 10.0%, 144 MIN
Rissmiller: 0:20, 2.75%, 2G, 11.1%, 32 MIN
Winnik: 0:20, 2.27%, 2G, 6.9%, 46 MIN
McLeod: 0:14, 2.11%, 2G, 6.5%, 32 MIN
Hejda: 0:13, 1.01%, 1G, 8.3%, 73 MIN
O'Byrne: 0:05, .46% 0G
Answer to Question #3 - Peter Mueller. Over 1/5 of his entire career has been on the man advantage. Hejduk and Stastny are close behind, but not even they can compete with that.
Answer to Question #4: Even though he doesn't lead the team in PP time, Milan Hejduk is the most deadly Av on the man advantage. Stastny does okay, but minute for minute, he's not our best power play scorer. Hejduk takes that award, along with the one for the most PP goals at 132. However, a larger percentage of Hejduk's points come from the power play. Without it (based off last week's article), he would average 20G a season. Stastny would average 17, which is a narrower gap than 32G (Hejduk) to 25G (Stastny).
Answer to Question #5: EJ. Over HALF of his goals came from the man advantage. Hopefully he can add to his overall goal totals next year, both on the power play and off it.
Answer to Question #6: Johnson and...?. Based off power play experience, it will be Quincey. However, based off effectiveness, Hejda actually beats him by a lot. In fact, in minutes between PP Goals, everyone but Hunwick and O'Byrne completely school Quincey. The Avs may opt to play just 1 defenseman and 4 forwards on the man advantage. But which D-man will be on the second unit? No one knows right now. It could open the door to a rookie like Stefan Elliott or Tyson Barrie if they make the team.
Fun Fact #2: Even with the Tank during the second half of the year, the Avs still finished #11 in power play percentage. They scored 18.5% of the time (49 goals in 256 attempts).
Fun Fact #3: The top 4 most effective power play players on the team (the ones with the least amount of PP time per goal) are all right wingers. The next 3 play left wing.
Penalty Kill:
Hejda: 3:32, 0 SHG (short-handed goal)
McClement: 2:57, 3 SHG
O'Reilly: 2:40, 3 SHG
Galiardi: 2:25, 1 SHG
Quincey: 1:58, 0 SHG
Stastny: 1:50, 1 SHG
Wilson: 1:50, 0 SHG
Winnik: 1:46, 2 SHG
Rissmiller: 1:46, 0 SHG
O'Brien: 1:38, 0 SHG
Hunwick: 1:18, 1 SHG
Cumiskey: 1:14, 0 SHG
Johnson: 1:12, 1 SHG
Jones: 1:09, 2 SHG
O'Byrne: 1:08, 0 SHG
Hejduk: 1:00, 6 SHG
McLeod: 0:47, 0 SHG
Kobasew: 0:36, 3 SHG
Lindstrom: 0:28, 0 SHG
Porter: 0:24, 1 SHG
Yip: 0:20, 1 SHG
Duchene: 0:15, 1 SHG
Mueller: 0:08, 0 SHG
Answer to Question #7: McClement has a higher average PKTOI as of right now, although I bet O'Reilly will average more this season. And the second half was a trick question - they both have 3 short handed goals, although it took McClement 6 years to get his. It took Radar only 2.
Answer to Question #8: Oddly enough, it's Matt Duchene and Peter Mueller. However, Matt's been the second most effective short handed goal scorer on the team, right after Brandon Yip But can you say "Small Sample Size"? :) However, if you subtract out PK time from ATOI totals, Stastny averages 18:23 ATOI. Matt comes in at 18:05.
Not So Fun Fact #1 - Our PK was terrible last year. We allowed 75 goals in 314 penalty kills, which gave us a LEAGUE WORST kill percentage of 76.1%.
Fun Fact #4 - Even though we couldn't keep the puck out of the net on the penalty kill last year, we had no trouble putting it in. We tied for 7th in the league in Short-Handed Goals with 8. The team we tied with? Edmonton, the team with the second worst PK.
Fun Fact #5 - McClement has the most PK experience of anyone on the team. He's logged almost 1400 minutes, which is nearly 200 more than the next most experienced PK'er (Hejda). It's also 3.5 times as many as Radar has, although O'Reilly clocked more minutes in his first two seasons than McC did (414 for Radar, 331 for McClement).