OTF Classic

There will be numerous posts, no doubt, celebrating the 10th anniversary of perhaps the greatest regular-season NHL game in recent memory, the duel between the Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings at Joe Louis Arena that featured Darren McCarty's pummeling of Claude Lemieux , among other epic battles. Rather than comment on the game from today's perspective, I thought I'd provide a contemporary look, as in those early days of the World Wide Web I was a columnist for a hockey website called In The Crease (now only found in the Internet Archives ), and due to the hard work of our NHL editor, we had worked up enough credibility in those days that I got my first press pass to cover this highly anticipated matchup (and to think how slowly the issue of press access for bloggers has come along since then). By that point I had been writing columns online about the Red Wings for a couple years, having joined ITC after participating in innumerable newsgroup threads, and answerin...

Due to popular demand (OK, one email someone sent me), I thought I'd expand on my recent article covering the Atlanta and New Jersey offensive trends, and go through all 30 NHL teams, covering both offense and defense in terms of generating (and preventing) shots, measured by quantity and quality. By using Shots For, Shots Against, and Shot Quality to come up with Expected Goals For and Against, we are effectively isolating team play from the effects of stellar or subpar goaltending. Where there's a significantly wide and persistent gap between those two values, we start to consider whether it's the goalie's fault (in a defensive slide), or a run against a series of superior opposing goalies (for an offensive drought), etc. Today we'll begin with the Northwest Division, that morass of mediocrity that currently shows all five teams within a mere four points in the standings. Will things stay this close over the next few months, or will a team or two start to take the...