Dallas Stars October In Review: Hockeymetrics (Part 1)

In previous editions of Hockeymetrics, I’ve focused on individual-based metrics.

With this being the last Hockeymetrics post for the month of October, I decided to shift gears a bit and see where the Stars rank with the rest of the league using a few team based metrics, primarily, the GF/60 and GA/60 metrics for even strength, power play, and shorthanded situations.

The data is provided by Behind The Net.

GF/60 and GA/60 is probably the most widely used team metric in hockeymetrics. It’s calculated as Goals For / (TOI/60). I like it primarily when used for measuring power plays because it takes into account the total power play time as opposed to power play opportunities. It never made sense to me that a 3 second power play in hockey can count the same as a five minute power play.

Anyway, on with the stats.

Now before I get into the Goals For and Goals Against stats, I wanted to point your attention towards the 5-on-4 and 4-on-5 TOI stats because it does show some really encouraging news about the Stars.

As you can see, the Stars are just outside the Top 11 at 11th with an average of 6.4 minutes of 5on4 man advantage time per game.

When you look at the teams with the fewest amount of time spent killing penalties, it gets a little better.

Now before somebody calls me to the mat on this, I’ll submit to you that this isn’t necessarily a good barometer of the Stars penalty killing. Obviously when you surrender a lot of power play goals against, that alone is going to cut down on the amount of time spent on the penalty killing.

But so does not taking many penalties, which the Stars haven’t done. They’ve averaged taking around 3 to 4 penalties.