Last night, the word "clutch" was thrown around more than a baseball on opening day. Matt Duchene's shootout game winner, Brian Boucher's incredible save, and Michal Handzus' game tying goal with just a minute left against Anaheim were all slapped with this tag.

For baseball fans, the idea of clutch, and whether or not it is prevalent in certain players, has long been debated over the years. Sabermetrics fans have long spurned such an argument, conducting tons of statistical analyses, while the "traditionalists" continue to buy into the idea of a player rising to the occasion above his natural mean in key situations. Traditionalists also point to rule exceptions that put holes into the arguments of their opposition, citing players like all-star Paul Molitor, a 1B/DH whose late and close/playoff stats just blow away his regular season splits.

While the argument started in the spot of baseball, it has since carried over to both basketball and hockey, and continues to beg the same question - do players really improve past their inherent skill level in "clutch" situations, or is it simply a myth? While new age hockey statistics are still in their early stages, their fan base is growing, and so is the argument between the two sides.

To simply define clutch: A player who rises to the occasion, past his natural mean, and performs above his normal level in late and close situations. For instance(just as an example) - if Daniel Alfredsson of the Ottawa Senators is roughly a 1 PPG player(just decimal points under for his career, you'd expect him to contribute just that during a sixty minute tilt. Although hard to quantify because statistics in hockey are much less looked at in a sport than baseball, you'd look to see Alfredsson's scoring metrics when a goal is of the absolute essence. Is Alfy better than a 1 PPG player in games that come down to the wire? Is he better than 1PPG in playoff games? And so on.

As a kid growing up, I long believed in the idea of clutch. It seemed so easy to coin a player like Michael Jordan as clutch, and Alex Rodriguez as unclutch, as they seemingly performed to perfection in every big situation. As I grew older, I tended towards the Sabermetrics crowd in baseball, and began really looking at some of these athletes more closely. Much to my dismay, Alex Rodriguez, long embattled for his postseason struggles, is a .305 hitter in the regular season, and .302 in the playoffs. Jordan's .497 regular season field goal percentage is just a few buckets ahead of his .487 playoff field goal percentage. David Ortiz, long known as one of the primetime hitters in big situations, has the exact same batting average in the regular season and the playoffs.

Batting average is an old and overrated statistic and shouldn't be held with the utmost value, but was used since it's so simplistic. If you desire, you can look at "late and close" statistics for a more definitive response. Unfortunately, basketball and hockey fail to really measure this, but baseball does. For instance, Derek Jeter's late and close regular season average(just under .300) is just .016 under his late and close playoff average. As you can see, almost negligible.

From the hockey spectrum, more of the same:

Sidney Crosby's 1.35 PPG average in the playoffs is just .07 better than his regular season average.

Jarome Iginla's 0.90 PPG average in the regular season is identical to his .90 playoff PPG average.

Mark Messier's 1.07 PPG average in the regular season is pretty comparable to his 1.25 PPG playoff average.

Wayne Gretzky, generally regarded as the greatest player of all time, has a regular season PPG average of 1.92, and a playoff PPG average of 1.84.

Martin Brodeur's .914 save percentage in the regular season is just .006 off from his .920 postseason save percentage.

Obviously, there's much more to measure, and these comparisons are in their simplest and purest form. However, the basic point I'm trying to make still stands - these players will generally perform in "clutch" situations as they have during any other situation. When you try to factor in luck into the algorithm, it becomes a completely convoluted mess.

There's always exceptions to the rule, and you'll find some in any sport. It certainly does seem like Sidney Crosby scores a ton of big goals when his team needs him the most, but is that a product of him being clutch, or a product of him being a great player? The same can be said for Alexander Ovechkin and other elite skaters in the National Hockey League. While a lot of us tend to qualify these athletes as clutch, it seems now more than ever that they're simply performing as well as they always do. This season, Crosby and Ovechkin are both over 100 points, and you can be absolutely certain they'll have some big scores in this year's post-season. Is that them necessarily rising to the occasion, or just doing what they always do?

The major flaw in the argument of "clutch" is that traditionalists tend to point to outliers or rule exceptions as the end all to the debate. Unfortunately, most of these exceptions are due to small sample sizes and statistical variation, which is why you'll sometimes see players seemingly performing better or worse, statistically speaking. Clutch is regarded as a mental thing, yet all professional athletes are so highly trained and incredibly coordinated with muscle memory, and rely almost solely on reflexes and inherent talent when they're at work.

Clutch seems to be just a quirky label fans, media, and analysts attach to the best players in the NHL to create stories, add drama, and generate heroes of sorts. Our country(and Canada, too) has long been built on heroism, and trying to segway that into the sports world just seems commonplace these days.

Lastly, the biggest flaw I find in the clutch argument is that there tends to be an enormous confirmation bias with traditionalists. Not to continually pick on Sidney Crosby, and Alex Ovechkin, but since they are the two most well known hockey players and head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, we'll continue to use them as examples. They both have their fair share of game tying goals and dramatic game winners, sure. But how many times didn't they score a game tying or game winning goal? Unfortunately, our brain doesn't process this kind of information because we tend to disregard the bad and welcome the good. Even in games where they did score the clutch goal, how many chances did it take them to do so in the first place?

Obviously, this argument has both sides, so I'd like to hear you guys weigh in on this. Do you believe some players in the NHL are naturally clutch or unclutch? Which ones? And if you don't believe in clutch, why not?

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