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What Should the Realistic Expectations Be For Chris Kunitz In 2013-2014?

July 12, 2013, 8:28 AM ET [91 Comments]
Ryan Wilson
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Chris Kunitz had one of the best seasons of his career in 2012-2013. He scored 22 goals and had 30 assists during the 48 game campaign. It was the first season in his career in which he registered more than a point per game. He was honored by being selected to the NHL First-Team All-Stars along with his center Sidney Crosby.

Looking forward to the 2013-2014 season, should Kunitz be expected to build upon those impressive numbers?

Let’s look at the data.

Below you will see a chart of Chris Kunitz’s career. It is organized by season and includes some basic stats such as games played, goals, goals per game, and shooting percentage. Those are pretty self explanatory.

The stat in the very last column is PDO. It is a relatively new metric and was not recorded until the 2007-2008 season. Here is the definition of the stat as provided by behindthenet.ca.


PDO is the sum of "On-Ice Shooting Percentage" and "On-Ice Save Percentage" while a player was on the ice. It regresses very heavily to the mean in the long-run: a team or player well above 1000 has generally played in good luck and should expect to drop going forward and vice-versa.



With that in mind, let’s look at the chart below:



Notice that for much of Kunitz’s career he has had fairly stable statistical trends. His goals per game ratio has been steady and in most years his shooting percentage has been in the same range.

The exceptions to the rule have been the 2010-2011 season and the 2012-2013 season. If you look at his PDO for both seasons, you will find that his numbers are well above the 1000 mark. You could say that Kunitz was “luckier” in those seasons. There have been studies on the PDO stat and they have all come to the conclusion that as time goes on PDO will always regress to the median, which is 1000.

Safe to say, Chris Kunitz will be regressing towards the median next year.

Jordan Eberle is one recent example of not being able to sustain a high PDO and put up similar stats in back to back years. Here is his career chart:



As you can see it’s just not realistic to expect a player to continue on with a PDO well above 1000, which also includes a shooting percentage close to 20%.

This does not mean that Jordan Eberle is not a very good player; it just means that the rate of production he was producing was not sustainable over the long term.

Likewise, this does not in any way shape or form mean that Chris Kunitz will not have a good 2013-2014 season. All this means is that Kunitz is probably not going to be scoring at a .46 goals per game ratio while maintaining a shooting percentage of 19.5%.

Thanks for reading!

You can find my non-Penguin related articles over at HockeyHurts.com

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