Predators vs Blues Jackets: The Advanced Stats

One of our best indicators of how the overall flow of play proceeds is the Corsi Rating, which reflects the total number of shots fired by a player's team while he's on the ice, minus the number fired by the opposing team. We limit this review to even-strength situations, so it's a fair comparison (if you work the power play, of course you should be on-ice for plenty of shots).

By Total Shots, we mean the Shots on Goal that you see tallied on the scoreboard during a game, as well as those shots which are blocked by an opponent, or miss the net. It's meant to describe which team spent more time in the offensive zone applying pressure when an individual on the ice, as close as we can guess. This value can be heavily influenced by how a player gets deployed (taking more faceoffs in the offensive zone than the defensive one will boost a guy's numbers), so I have included Net Zone Starts (positive number = that guy got extra faceoffs in the offensive end), then Adjusted Corsi results based on that usage.

For each of the tables below, I list the forwards followed by the defense, in descending order of ice time. Hopefully I can provide these after each Preds game. Please let me know in the comments how this format works for you. I want to convey the meat of the thing, without getting bogged down with too much information.

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Nashville Predators

Yeah, I think that Roman Josi/Shea Weber pairing looks pretty good so far, eh? Up front, Craig Smith does stick out like a sore thumb.

Columbus Blue Jackets

By contrast, the top defense pair for Columbus spent a lot of time scrambling in their own end.

For more on the Corsi Rating and its utility in hockey stats analysis, head over to Arctic Ice Hockey's tutorial.