



I’ve gotten a lot of, shall we say, constructive criticism about my takes on the Islanders this season.

I routinely put them somewhere between the high teens and mid-20s in the Power Rankings, and while they’ve been creeping up more and more lately because they keep winning, it hasn’t been enough to convince people that I am not some sort of deranged Islanders hater.

The Cliff’s Notes version of my skepticism of this team is pretty simple: They are eighth in the league in points percentage, but 24th in adjusted corsi at 5-on-5, 17th in all-situations adjusted expect-goals share, and fifth in all-situations PDO. Big disparities between results and performance, you’d have to agree.

Simply put, teams with these kinds of characteristics are not legitimately good. They may appear that way, especially to partisans, but as a general rule if you’re putting up huge percentages and getting out-attempted by four or five tries an hour, it’s not a long-term recipe for success.

This is, I’ve been told, a reductive view of this particular team that is rather poor at controlling the puck but really good at, I guess, having high percentages. Stop me if you’ve heard it before, but the “pro” argument here is that they’ve sacrificed shot quantity for shot quality.

To some extent, you can kind of see where they’re coming from. After all, this summer they went out and got a coach with a very good reputation who’s fresh off a Stanley Cup. As pointed out by Dimitri Filipovic last week over at ESPN, Barry Trotz teams tend to outperform their poor underlyings and even the shot quality they generate (as expressed by adjusted expected-goal percentages, which account for PK and PP shots accordingly). For the record, their all-situations goals-for percentage is third in the league, despite a negative xGF total for the season.

And just to break it down further, the Islanders have scored 0.17 more goals per 60 in all situations than their xGF number would suggest, and stopped 0.35 more than xGA. That may not sound like much, but when you figure they’re getting an extra half-goal more than they “should” in either direction almost every game they play, it adds up quick.

(AP Photo/Jeffrey T. Barnes) More

But let’s circle back to the Trotz thing and think about how he’s so ably exceeded expected goals over the previous three seasons. More specifically, let’s think about how that plays into what he had to work with in Washington versus what he has on Long Island.

Let’s start from the net out: Braden Holtby has a long-term track record of being an elite goaltender, which evaded him for most of last season but got sorted out in the playoffs, which is when it mattered. Goaltenders with high-end talent are always going to give teams higher-than-100 PDOs; we’ve seen it time and again.

But while Thomas Greiss and Robin Lehner may have pretty good track records as 1b goalies (they’ve played 238 and 232 games in 10- and nine-year careers, respectively), the idea that Trotz’s system and working with Mitch Korn turned them both into .920-plus goaltenders overnight is, to me, absurd. Especially because the league average is down so much this year.

I’d buy that Holtby and a backup could go 15 or so points above the league average in an 82-game season because I have proof of concept there. I don’t have anything resembling it with this tandem.

Now let’s look at the blue lines. The Caps’ minutes leaders on defense over the previous three seasons are Matt Niskanen, John Carlson, Karl Alzner, and Dmitry Orlov. There may not be Elite talent there, but it’s quite clearly a top-eight or so group in the league over a three-year period. Now let’s look, if we dare, at the Islanders’ minutes leaders this season: Ryan Pulock, Nick Leddy, Scott Mayfield, Thomas Hickey. Some decent defenders in there but hardly comparable, talent-wise.

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