Since the All Star break, no one has been winning more than the Golden Knights. Their 12-2-2 record is the best in the league since the beginning of February and they’ve done it while playing one of the toughest schedules of any team.
The wins are continuing to cement VGK’s place in the playoff picture and have them as clear favorites to win the Pacific Division with less than 20 games to go. What the wins are not doing though are impressing the stat nerds (myself included).
While the Golden Knights have beaten many of the best teams in the league over this recent stretch, they are doing it in a bit of an ugly way. They’ve been outshot in 11 of the last 12, have given up at least eight high-danger chances in 13 straight games, and have lost the expected goals battle in 8 of the last 11.
Over the last 16 games, the Golden Knights lead the league in points percentage, while ranking 20th in expected goals, 25th in Corsi, and 25th in scoring chance percentage at 5-on-5. One of the main reasons for the difference in results vs. analytics is VGK’s shooting and save percentage. They rank 2nd in the league in shooting percentage and 3rd in save percentage for a wildly inflated PDO of 1.051.
So the question becomes, over the course of a larger sample size, how reliant are the Golden Knights’ results on their analytics?
The first way to analyze this is to look through a bunch of different 15-game segments the Golden Knights have played this season. There are a few awesome ones, a few poor ones, and some average ones. Comparing them to the analytics will help show the correlation or lack thereof.