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Tom Pyatt and the Quest for a Goal

November 6, 2018, 1:29 PM ET [20 Comments]
Trevor Shackles
Ottawa Senators Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
You can follow me on Twitter @ShackTS

Something is happening this season that is truly historical. It is something you might only witness a few times on your favourite team in your entire lifetime…

And that is the fact that through 14 games, Tom Pyatt has not been on the ice for a single goal at even strength (or any situation). Sounds too ridiculous to be true, right? Believe it, because it’s the truth. Pyatt has played 197.23 minutes overall and 157.32 minutes at 5v5 and has been on for zero goals for and seven against (plus eight on the penalty kill). For some of you, that might just sound like a bunch of numbers that don’t mean anything.

But I’m here to put it in some amazing context for you.

The Corsica.hockey database goes back to the 2007-08 season, and in that time frame, only three other players have played as many 5v5 minutes as Pyatt has without being on the ice for a goal:




He has a long way to go to surpass the worst player, Eric Boulton, but don’t count out a miracle. In fact, I’ll be paying even closer attention to these upcoming 8-10 games to see if Pyatt can actually be on the ice for a goal. On the one hand, I feel for him because I’m sure he’s well aware about how he’s never participated in the post-goal train. However, seeing him actually surpass Boulton’s “record” would be pretty incredible for all the wrong reasons.

To get to second place, he will have to play 79 minutes to beat Philippe Dupuis’s drought from 2011-12, and to get to third, he will need 38 minutes to beat Teemu Hartikainen from 2012-13. I’m not sure if these are actually the longest goalless droughts within a season, because there might have been some players who were on the ice for a goal in the first game of the season and the last game, but played hundreds of minutes in between. Finding the answer to that is simply too difficult, although by searching for players who were not on for a single goal is probably the best way to do this.

I’m obviously not able to find stats from before 2007 so that excludes decades of data, but being amongst the three longest droughts in over a decade is still pretty significant. Even if he’s actually only in the top-15 or 20 worst of all-time, that is incredible considering the thousands of players that have come through the league.

Since I wrote this article and now it is in people’s minds, I wouldn’t even be surprised if he broke the streak tonight. That’d be par for the course for a writer bringing up an incredible streak only to have it end right away. Nevertheless, it’s something I’ve never seen before, and it’s another data point to show that Pyatt has been one of the most ineffective players in the league.
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