As the NHL revved its engines and kicked off its 2016-17 season, the game’s youngest and brightest lights shone. Auston Matthews dazzled in his debut with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Connor McDavid continued where he left off last season, rapidly ascending to the throne of “best player in the NHL.”

And the Blackhawks — well, they started the season with a thud.

Two games don’t make a season make, even two losses to division foes. Rather than fixate on the defeats, and before we get too far into 2016-17, let’s take a look back at some trends year-over-year statistical trends for Chicago to get a sense of where the team might be headed as the season gets underway.

This graph shows Chicago’s yearly Corsi for percentage (CF%) for the past nine years. For much of the past decade, the Blackhawks have been a dominant puck possession team, routinely ranking among the NHL’s best in shot share. In fact, the team has posted CF% marks of 55% or better six times during the era.

That’s impressive.

However, there is some reason for concern. The Blackhawks have retreated to the pack over the past three years, slowly sliding back towards the break-even possession mark of 50%. Forward stars Jonathan Toews (28 years old) and Patrick Kane (27) are exiting their peak years. The team’s blue line corps is aging too – Duncan Keith is 33 years old, Brent Seabrook is 31 and Niklas Hjalmarsson is 29. There’s reason to suspect that the team’s possession stats will continue to slide.



A look at the team’s share of scoring chances (SCF%) reveals a more troubling trend (for more on how a scoring chances is defined, check here and here). There’s a downward trend over the past three years and, worse, the Blackhawks have already spent two consecutive years below 50%.

Measures like CF% and SCF% are stats that repeat year-over-year and are notably related to a team’s goals for percentage, which is of clear importance for any team intending to win games. Chicago’s sliding rates in both metrics are certainly a cause for concern as the team begins the 2016-17 season.

A final note on team-level stats review for the 2015-16 Blackhawks is their PDO results. PDO is a straightforward metric that combines a team’s 5v5 save percentage and shooting percentage. We expect these two measures to add to 100 over the course of a season.

Last season, the Blackhawks posted a team save percentage of approximately 92.75%, which was above league average. As a team, the Blackhawks were below average in shooting percentage at 5v5, finishing the season below 7.0%. After 82 games, the Blackhawks finished with a PDO of 99.57, with a team tilt towards stingier, “no goals” play.

Certainly, there were some worrisome signs at the team level last year and prior. Let’s take a closer look in at some player level metrics to gauge where individual Blackhawks skaters are headed this year.

One of the greatest sources of new player data comes from the Passing Project led by Ryan Stimson (@RK_Stimp). Stimson and his team of game trackers record rich data about passes, which has been used to help create deeper insights about both offense and defense. For an example on how this data can be applied at the player level, read through Stimson’s work here or a piece on the passing skills of Henrik Sedin and Kris Versteeg here.

What does the passing data say about the Blackhawks?

This chart shows each players shot assist rate per 60 minutes – that is, the number of passes the skater made that led directly to a shot by a team (where shot = a Corsi) on the y-axis. The x-axis is the player’s shot (Corsi) rate per hour. We know that these rates are repeatable year-over-year and that a player’s total rate of shot assists and shots (called Primary Shot Contributions by Stimson) is very useful for predicting the number of primary points that a player will score.

A few names stand out for different reasons.

On the plus side, Jonathan Toews ranks with some of the game’s best at providing shot assists for teammates. His playing style is similar to Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl, Washington’s Nicklas Backstrom and L.A.’s Anze Kopitar. Artemi Panarin, Patrick Kane and Marian Hossa each ranked in the “all-around” category because they provided above league-average rates in shot assists and shots. This core of top forwards is a strong group of offensive players.

The Blackhawks have parted ways with Andrew Shaw and Ryan Garbutt, the team’s most shot-heavy players. Brandon Mashinter, the team’s least contributor to offense, has been reassigned to the AHL to start the season.

Chicago’s blue liners are an interesting group in terms of offensive contributions. Duncan Keith represents the defense corps as the best all-around contributor, which is hardly a surprise.

But after Keith, there’s little to like among this group in terms of offensive play. Christian Ehrhoff has moved on, Viktor Svedberg is in the AHL, and the remainder of last season’s Blackhawks defensemen rank near league average or below. It is worth noting that the newly-arrived Brian Campbell fills a void as, you guessed it, one of the NHL’s best shot assist artists among defensemen.

The last area worth a look is perhaps the most difficult area to treat with modern hockey statistics. For the most part, advances in the stats used to measure forwards and defensemen have far outpaced the progress made with goalie analysis.

However, Nick Mercadante (@nmercad) does excellent work going behind traditional (and flawed) statistics like goals against average or standard save percentage.

His work on adjusted goals saved above average (nicknamed “Mercad/60) and above average appearance percentage help to view goalie performance relative to their peers and in the context of the workload that goalie actually faces. By these measures, Blackhawks’ starter Corey Crawford ranks among the game’s best.

Reminder: Lundqvist didn’t receive a Vezina vote, is having career shoehorned into age-related decline narrative. pic.twitter.com/lpChmMIV8n — Nick Mercadante (@NMercad) September 5, 2016

As long as Crawford remains healthy, the Blackhawks are set in goal with one of the NHL’s premier goaltenders.

Looking ahead

In his season preview, the model created by Micah Blake McCurdy (@ineffectivemath) predicted that the Blackhawks have a 64% chance of the making the playoffs, likely finishing around 6th in the Western Conference.

McCurdy’s predictions align well with the stats we’ve glanced at here. Chicago appears to be a team with a talented but aging group of top forwards, a couple of veteran leaders on defense, and strong goaltending, but lacking in the overall lineup depth needed to compete with the Western Conference’s best.

Unless coach Joel Quennville can find a way to stem the tide of a falling team CF%, begin to post positive numbers in scoring chance rates and round out his bottom-six with high-ceiling youngsters who can chip in with unexpected offense, it looks like Chicago is a team that is likely to settle back into the middle of the NHL pack this season.