The St. Louis Blues Power Play in Two Charts

One of the things I love about writing for St. Louis Game Time are the questions readers and the other writers pose to me from time to time. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to reply to all of them. However, Tim's question was relatively easy to take a look at and quick to put together.

Essentially, he claimed that there was a perception the Blues were missing the net a lot when taking shots during powerplays. He wanted to know if what people claimed they were seeing with their eyes could be confirmed with stats.

I used data from ExtraSkater.com to put together the two charts you see below. I was able to calculate the number of missed shots by subtracting the shots for from the fenwick for. Remember fenwick counts all shots (except blocked shots) that a team makes. This includes goals, misses, saves. So in order to pull the number of misses out of the fenwick stat, we substract the number of shots for (which are shots on net and goals scored) from fenwick. That should leave us with just the missed shots for each team. And since each team has different amounts of power play time, I created a shots missed per 60 minutes of ice time.

As you can see, the St. Louis Blues are just at league average in the number of misses per 60 and also at the league median for minutes of power play time. So are the Blues really bad at taking shots during the power play? Not really. With the median amount of power play time, they are making an average number of misses. I like that sound of that.

But what's even better is the fact that they are one of the top teams in goals scored and goals per 60 scored in the league right now. They are above median and above average, respectively, in both of those stats. Not to mention they have the third best shooting percentage in the league at the moment.

So smile. The Blues' power play is doing a great job so far this season.