Wednesday night was a 6-1 blow out by the St. Louis Blues and we all had a huge sigh of relief. Only to then be twisted in knots again after Friday night's debacle where the Blues lost a game 5 at home and going down 3-2 in the series and facing another first round elimination.

So this got me thinking. How could the Blues dominate Wednesday and turn around and flail on Friday. Are the Blues really that inconsistent this season? So I pulled the regular season game data for all the teams from War on Ice. I used score adjusted data simply because I wanted to account for any score affects that might have skewed their possession numbers. (For more reading about score affects and score adjusted stats you should read this article by Eric Tulsky.)

Using the game-by-game data from War on Ice, I was able to calculate what is called the variance of each team's Corsi For % throughout the regular season. What variance attempts to measure is how far away each data point is from the mean. In other words, how consistent are the data points. If the data points are all the same, then the variance equals zero. The larger the variance, the greater the distance each of the data points are from the mean. This is a very simplistic way to examine a team's consistency throughout the season, but I think some of the results are interesting.

Please note that I have removed Buffalo from all these charts because they were such an outlier. In case you were wondering where they were located within the quadrants, they were deep within the more consistent/worse quadrant on the chart. Finally, you shouldn't draw too many meaningful conclusions from this. This is really just to satisfy a curiosity of mine more than anything.