After the game, I tweeted that this year’s start is the exact opposite of last year’s start. Last year’s team was very bad, but started off the year with a great record. This year’s team is good, but has started off very poorly. Both of those starts were PDO driven (lucky/unlucky).
Last year, Calvin Pickard had .946 Save% for the month of October. No wonder they were 5-0-1 when he started!
This year the team has been undone by their shooting percentage. AHL shooting % is typically around 9.0% each year. This is last year’s bottom half of the league (I took out Shootout and Empty Net goals):
This year’s Rampage are shooting 4.3%. That is going to improve. Every single team has a stretch during a season where they run into 4 hot goalies in a row. This is that stretch for the Rampage. Even if you think that all of their forwards are garbage (they aren’t), their shooting % should still nearly double. Every game has been a one goal game (or two with an ENG), so just a tiny shooting% improvement makes them at least 2-2.
The one thing that does concern me so far is that the 1st line (Whitney-O’Brien-Sislo) and top defense pair (Bigras-Lindholm) have both been really awful. However, that can also be spun as a positive: “Their top players have been awful. The team seems super disjointed at times. They still have been over 50% in possession.”
Season Summary (I’ve been to 3 of the 4 games)
(This 4th line is amazing)
They don’t play Siemens enough! He works so hard for that team!
LikeLike
I think one area where Siemens gets hurt as far as eTOI is he plays no PP time. And this team has had a ton of power plays in the first 4 games.
LikeLike
eTOI is ( # Corsi on ice for) / (All Corsi) so it actually ignores PP/PK. It does seem to be reasonably accurate though
LikeLike