Follow @james_tanner123 Nice story and all, but it's about time the Las Vegas Golden Knights returned to reality.
You can only defy the laws of regression for so long, Seà±or Fleury.
The Golden knights are a paper tiger led by a goaltender who is having a season for the ages. Not to say they're a bad team - they're not. But their success has got them overrated. You could replay this season a million times and the odds that they'd ever finish fifth overall are extremely low.
Their roster is roughly that of a borderline playoff team. But I'm no homer - the same goes with the Capitals. It's amusing because these two teams have the fifth and sixth best regular season records and most people assume that 82 games is enough to weed out luck and show you who's for real. It's not.
Luck is a bigger factor than skill in hockey games until at least a 70 game sample. This is a well known trope in the so-called analytic community. And it follows that if that's true, then it wouldn't take too crazy of a situation for luck to be a bigger factor than skill beyond many more games.
Baseball has something called Pythagorean Record, which is how many games a team "should" have won vs their real record, and even after 162 games the records can differ.
Of the four major sports, hockey is said to be the most effected by luck because you only play your best players for roughly a third of the game, and the goalie has such a drastic influence on the outcome while also being the player whose performance is the most random and the most varied.
Anyways, despite it being counterintuitive, hockey teams can and do get lucky for entire seasons. If they didn't the Pittsburgh Penguins would be playing the Nashville Predators tomorrow night.
They had the 13th best possession stats in the NHL this year, just slightly ahead of the Canadians and Oilers (two should-have-been-playoff teams with much better rosters) and the Capitals were ranked 24th.
The Knights were 15th in shots/60 and the Capitals were 31st. The Knights were 11th in shots against/60 and the Capitals were 16th.
Neither of these teams were top ten in shot-attempts or shots allowed. They are both bad at shot-generation and have average defense.
But when it comes to goals/60, the Knights were 5th and the Caps 7th. Goals are random and if you're 15th in shots and 13th in possession, it's unlikely you'll be 5th in goals, but it happened. This is partly fueled by W. Karlssson's 43 goals and the fact that he scored on one of four of his shots. Nice totals, but good luck matching that ever again.
If we look at playoff stats, it doesn't get much prettier.
The Knights and Caps are the 7th and 8th best possession teams in the playoffs - so average.
The Capitals are 7th in shots/60 and the Knights are 12th. The Capitals, owing mostly to the insane play of Matt Niskanen and Dmitri Orlov, are 2nd in shots-allowed/ 60 while the Knights are a very average 7th.
Statistically, what we have are two extremely average teams.
So why are they here?
Well, first you have to credit Barrie Trotz. God knows I've ripped the guy a ton, but he (or his staff) somehow got the 16th best regular season team at preventing shots to play 19 games and become the second best. That's definitely good stuff.
But beyond that, you must credit the goalies.
Braden Holtby has a .924 save percentage. For perspective, if he did that over 60 games it would be in the top 30 of all time best goalies seasons ever.
Marc-Andre Fleury has a .947 save percentage, which is ridiculous. I read somewhere that even if he'd allowed 12 more goals over these playoffs he'd still be by far the best goalie. Assuming that is true *(cause I can't find it again)* it's INSANE.
So anyways, the Capitals are going to win the Stanley Cup because a) Fleury can't keep this up and the normalization of his percentages are going to cost his team a couple of games and b) the Capitals are better defensively and c) the Capitals goalie is playing closest to his normal game (which is hall of fame worthy) and d) fluke seasons aside, Holtby is the better goalie and Washington has the better roster.
I'll say Washington in Five.
stats from corsica.hockey naturalstattrick.com quanthockey.com nhl.com hockeydb.com