Carolina Hurricanes Stats: 1/4 Mark Stat Report

Carolina Hurricanes’ stats provide a clear picture of the team’s play this season

The Carolina Hurricanes sit at 9-9-4 a quarter of the way through the season.  Their 22 points put them at seventh in the division, 14th in the conference, and both are places the Canes don’t want to be.  They are two points ahead of last year with the same amount of games played.  Simple wins and loses never tell the whole story though and a deeper dive into the Canes underlying stats should give a clearer picture.  All data and numbers are sourced from Corsica, 5v5, and score and Venue adjusted.

Corsi

The Hurricanes are a top five CF% team in the NHL.  Their 53.56% places them at fourth in the league behind only Washington, Boston, and L. A.  Out of the top five in CF% three sit in playoff spots and Boston doesn’t only because of tie breakers.  When it comes to shot attempts, Carolina regularly outplays their opponents just about every night.  So why isn’t this translating into wins like those other teams?  Well, the answer may be in the next stats.

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Save and Shooting Percentage

See the reason the Carolina Hurricanes aren’t winning more games most likely lies with their shooting and save percentages.  Right now the Canes sit at 18th in the league with a 6.95 shooting percentage and 27th in the league with a .912 SV%.  The thing is the Canes played better than those averages this season it’s just they can’t sync up and be good at both at the same time.  Take a look at these graphs over time for both stats.

As the graphs show, Carolina shot lights out to start the season but couldn’t stop the puck to save their lives.  And more recently it’s the exact opposite.  The goaltenders increased their performance while the goals stopped.  If they could ever figure out how to score goals and keep them out of their net at the same time they might actually turn into a good team.

Goals For % (GF%) vs Expected Goals For % (xGF%)

There are a few models out there that predict goals.  This article uses the one on the Corsica website.  But according to almost all the models out there, the Carolina Hurricanes should score quite a bit more than they do.  Carolina’s xGF% is 53.50 again good enough to put them in the top five of the league.  Obviously, there is a great discrepancy between that and the actual GF% of

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46.15 good for 19th in the league.

A lot of people would immediately point towards Cam Ward letting in too many goals, but actually, it’s the opposite.  The Hurricanes xGA60 versus GA60 is only 2.31 to 2.45 respectively.  The larger difference lies between and xGF60 and GF60 with 2.71 expected goals to 2.06 real goals per sixty minutes.  And while bad goaltending hurt the team in the past now the greater detriment to the team is a lack of goal scoring.

PDO

So as the stats show up above either the Carolina Hurricanes fluctuated between good shooting/poor goaltending and poor shooting/good goaltending throughout this season.  What does that add up to?  One of the worst PDOs in the league.  PDO is the sum of a team’s save percentage and shooting percentage and over time averages out around 100.  The Hurricanes sit at 27th in PDO with a 98.11.  Looking at the other stats confirms it.  The Hurricanes can’t get everything together at one time in order to win games

The Hurricanes play this year can be described as uneven at best, but if the Hurricanes can actually find some consistency in their play they could become a dangerous team.  Whether they will remains to be seen, but given their great CF%, it shows that there are good systems in place and as the team adds talent they could blossom into a powerhouse.