Philadelphia Flyers: Way too early preseason fancy stats
The Philadelphia Flyers get a chance to avenge their loss Monday against the NY Rangers tonight in their first home game of the preseason. But as you enjoy tonight’s festivities, here is some way to early fancy stats from the preseason.
As the regular season draws ever closer to starting, I wanted to take some time out to see how the Philadelphia Flyers are doing in the advanced stats department.
If you read my Flyers articles and plan on continuing to this season, you’ll notice me bringing up stats like Corsi (shots for and against). If you aren’t sure of a stat I’m using, here is a glossary of the terms that help explain what they mean.
Now, since some of the games don’t have available play-by-play data some players will be missing games or ice-time. But the purpose of looking at this data isn’t to make any rash judgments on any particular player. I just want to ease you into what I’ll be bringing to the table when it comes to this Flyers season.
So please remember, we are looking at tiny sample sizes here and many of the players you’ll see in the charts going forward will not be wearing a Flyers jersey this year. Man, I wish one of them was Andrew MacDonald.
Scoring Chances
It’s very encouraging to see names like Jordan Weal and Travis Konecny up towards the top. The Philadelphia Flyers are hoping they both provide five on five scoring. It’s an area that the Flyers place 27th in the last three years. When your team is listed next to the likes of the Coyotes and Canucks you know it’s an area that needs improving.
You might also notice former Wheat Kings teammates Ivan Provorov and Nolan Patrick are carrying excellent scoring chance plus/minus, +12 and +13 respectively.
One player who is a bit of a disappointment for me, again small sample sizes, has to be Mark Friedman. Friedman if you recall from my rookie game observations, looked good. He was fast, he broke up entries and played with a chip on his shoulder So far in the preseason, he’s looked bad. He’s sporting a -11 in scoring chance plus/minus.
Shots For and Against
Someone I didn’t mention when looking at the Flyers scoring chance plus/minus was Robert Hagg. He has the second-best shot differential for a Flyers defenseman, trailing only Ivan Provorov. Hagg is the most NHL-ready defenseman the Flyers are auditioning this preseason.
As far as forwards, it’s more of the same from the scoring chance chart.
Nolan Patrick has played extremely well this preseason, sporting a +9 shot differential. Even without that stat if you’ve been watching the games you come away impressed by his passing and hockey IQ. It’s still surreal to me we got to select this kid.
And finally, a Flyers’ forward who is fighting for a bottom-six role is Scott Laughton. While he has a -3 shot differential his play in the preseason has been encouraging. He’ll be an upgrade over Pierre-Edouard Bellemare or Chris VandeVelde as he can score. The question will be how well he plays in his end. Defensively Laughton was a liability when he was up with the big club. He’ll look to remedy that this year.
Going Forward
The Philadelphia Flyers play two more games to finish out the preseason. I’m hoping that one, if not both, will be tracked by NHL.com so I can add that data to the charts you saw in this article.
Next: Left wing move may be last chance for Claude Giroux
Again, I’d like to reiterate that I want you to take my observations and the stats you read with a large grain of salt. These are some tiny sample sizes (some players only have one recorded game of data) I am working with, so we aren’t drawing any conclusions from these numbers. All we’re doing here is getting some impressions, ones if they’re good, hopefully, will carry into the regular season.