Last season, we took inspiration from (aka: delicately ripped off) fellow SBN Hockey sites such as Japers’ Rink and Silver Seven, and introduced a new feature known simply as “Stars Ups & Downs” as a way to track the week to week trending progress of each Dallas Star based against how they performed the week before compared to what we expected from that player through the season and how they had been doing in previous weeks.
We are happy to bring this feature back starting this coming Monday and every Monday this season, but with a few minor changes this year to give it our own personal Defending Big D touch which you’ll be able to check out after the jump…
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| Comments: This is an example where our comments will go. By the way, could you imagine of there was an actual guy that went by the name “Player Name” in the NHL? How cool would that be? Not as cool as Ulf Dahlen of course, but still… | |||
Below each player’s name will be a stat line for that player from his previous week’s work. This won’t always be goals or assists but sometimes will instead be a key stat for that player – so for instance if Adam Burish blocks ten shots in the span of three games, we’ll be making a note of that in his stat line.
The next box to the right is where you’ll either see if the player is trending up, down or is even with how he performed. The following box next to it is how that player did last week.
The last box on the first row is the new part to this idea. Players will be ranked within five different levels: Outstanding, Favorable, Average, Struggling, and Slumping. This is in order to give our actual ups and downs some sort of context as last season we found there were times where we wanted to say that a player was trending down but to put a ‘down arrow’ by his name at times didn’t feel like we were doing that player proper justice as he may have still been playing well, just not as exceptional as he had been the week before.
The comments below each player are pretty self explanatory.
Keep in mind this is a completely arbitrary system based on not only stats but on how we’ve seen each player play over the past week. While we’ll do our best to be fair, we do understand if there are disagreements on how we’ve rated a player… Which of course is where you’re feedback in the comments section will always be welcome.