Bringing back an older concept…a few years ago, I was spurred by Tom Awad’s “Good Player” series to put together these radar charts of player ice-time. I’d always felt, for fantasy hockey purposes, it is important to know the boxcars (goals, assists, points) come from the ice-time as much as anything, and so the initial creation of what I called “Total Player Charts,” or TPCs, was to portray precisely that. It ended up that they gave intriguing portrayals of players that we felt had strong seasons. See Jamie Benn’s above; an Art Ross Trophy, sure, and much of it came from near the top share of playing time at evens and on the powerplay, league-wide. You can also get a sense of just how valuable a defenseman like T.J. Brodie is:
T.J. Brodie
2014-15 NHL Season Preview: The Pacific Division

Photo by Kaz Andrew, via Wikimedia Commons
Whenever I put together something as broad as a division preview, especially since the divisions have expanded, I usually try to slap something together that helps me get a quick impression of the teams as compared to one another. This time around, I put a little work into generating a 5v5 simulation of this coming season, specifically among the projected top 6 forwards, top 4 defensemen, and goaltenders. As 5v5 play comprises a little over 80% of all NHL gameplay, and these players tend to more consistently drive results (as players of around 3/5 to 2/3 of gameplay), focusing on their 5v5 performances from last year bring us to use a bit more stable indicators of future team performance. The quick-and-dirty approach here benefits from the fact that most of the Pacific lineups are quite similar from last year, and the top 6 and top 4 players tend to be deployed in the same roles from year to year. So, I took the average 5v5 Corsi-For% of the entire of the top 6 and top 4 for each team, the average 5v5 shooting percentage of the same group (for Johnny Gaudreau, I assumed a forward league-average 9%), and the career 5v5 save percentage of the projected goaltenders (for Fredrik Andersen I assumed a goaltender league-average 92.1%), and ended up with a projected 5v5 season that looked like this:
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