Summer of Ovi

Hey,

I hope everyone is having an excellent start to their summer. I'll be back all summer with analysis. Let's start off with some playoff recap. First, I want to take a moment to appreciate the Final we just witnessed. After going through what I believe was ten years having four different teams win championships, we were finally able to watch the Stanley Cup be lifted by a new team, one that has undoubtedly had its fair share of struggles over the years. Now, let's get down to the data. I want to start by examining how Alex Ovechkin's play helped bring his team to success. I am focusing on him, as he was the Conn Smythe winner. Although this might be subjective, Ovechkin is his team's captain and franchise player. Therefore, let's look deeper into his play. All statistics are courtesy of Natural Stat Trick. First, although this stat is used to consider how "lucky" a team is with a certain player on the ice, PDO, can be useful. Put simply, PDO is adding shooting percentage + save percentage when a certain player is on the ice. Ovi's PDO this year was his second highest in a playoff season since '08, with the '09 playoffs .017 points above. After looking on Wikipedia (it has what I need, I'm sorry), I found that the '09 playoffs were quite exciting for Ovi. This was the year his Caps came back from a 3-1 series deficit against my hometown Rangers before squaring off against a Crosby-led Penguins team bound for their Sid's first Stanley Cup Championship in an infamous series. This included, all according to Wikipedia, a game 2 with both Crosby and Ovi registering hat tricks. Even more, Ovi had FOURTEEN points in the series, one more than Sid's thirteen. Suffice it to say, it was an incredible playoff for Ovi, so it is fitting that he had a high PDO. Another interesting statistic is his usage. This year's playoff saw Ovi lining up for faceoffs in the offensive zone 60.98% of the time, which was the highest since '08. Before I continue, I want to clarify that all numbers from the current playoff year are from an increased sample size. Quite notable this year was the fact that it was the first time Ovi had advanced past the second round. Therefore, all his other years had a sample sized that maxed out at fourteen games. As a result, I will focus on percentages, as they should be less affected by this difference in sample size, which is at least 10 games. Unfortunately, I can't find any defensive statistics on this site, so I'm going to stick to offensive stats before wrapping this up. SF%, which is the percentage of shots for the Caps while Ovi is on the ice is actually quite interesting. It is fourth-to-last among playoff years since '08. Continuing, GF%, which is the same as SF% but for goals, was 65.63%, second highest since '08, behind, yep, you guessed, the 2009 playoff season. SCF%, scoring chances for, and HDCF%, high-danger scoring chances for, were somewhat surprisingly in the middle of the pack. Looking more closely at high-danger scoring chances reveals that his HDGF%, or goals of such chances, was third-highest, or second as the first two are tied. As I wrap-up, I would also like to note that ALL of these statistics are from 5v5. I was going to look at this year's NHL Draft, specifically Swedish phenom, Rasmus Dahlin, but I felt it would be best to save that for next week's post. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read my content, and I hope you have a wonderful week.

Best, Jonathan