Note: Written on 2/15 before Chicago

Here's the non-mathematical formula that describes the Rangers for me right now:

Good (Top 10) Team + Elite (Top 3 - playing as #1) Goaltender = "Elite" Contender

Henrik Lundqvist is having his peak year in the NHL, and if he keeps his Save % above a 0.935% he's most likely going to win the Vezina trophy, as he finally deserves. The Ranger skaters, meanwhile, have been a top 10 NHL club since Game 11 in terms of Shot Ratio (SR in the chart below); which is a good indicator of future performance. To show how far they've come after their lucky 11 game start, I threw together a quick (very raw) chart:

While this chart is somewhat unfair to certain teams, as they may have been on highs, mediums, or lows at Game 11, it illustrates perfectly the Rangers consistent improvement in becoming a complete team since that Halloween date with the Sharks. There are still clubs with better or equal skaters (DET, BOS, PITT, SJS, STL, VAN, and PHI - in no particular order), but to be honest none of them could match the contributions Lundqvist is making in goal.

So with all the happy and joy, where's my usual negative spin on things? I've got two today:

1) The recent win over the Bruins.

I missed the first period due to watching my brother's Junior playoff game. Texts, tweets, and the in-game tracked stats made it seem like it was a decent period with two NYR goals. Fantastic stuff, seeing as I only consider Pittsburgh, Boston, and Philadelphia as competition in the East right now (and in that order - god save NYR if Crosby comes back). Then the Henrik Lundqvist show started, and while he deserved all the credit in the world for the win, the two points earned by the players who didn't play within the NYR crease was frankly not deserved with that performance over the last forty minutes:

via behindthenet.ca

This is NOT a model we want to see for games going down the stretch. That third period in my mind? Pathetic. I could not WAIT for this chart to update in the morning after watching the third, just to confirm how poor the team played, and how well Lundqvist did. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the Rangers had to win this game 6-0 or something, but I want to see this team continue to improve going into the playoffs and really become the word I think we should all use with care: elite.

If the Rangers play in a similar fashion against Chicago, expect more of the same (aka Henrik or Biron having to do a lot of work).

2) Henrik Lundqvist

I won't beat this topic up, but all I have to say if the season ended now his save percentage (0.941) would be the highest of the post-lockout Vezina winners. He's due for a natural slide (even down to a HORRIBLE 0.930), but if you want some more quick info go back to the last metrics piece and read the first few paragraphs.

Oh and Jim, I probably used Lundsanity in close to ten text message conversations over the past few days. #Lundsanity

To the charts:

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At the All-Star Break, the New York Rangers continue to sit at number 1 in the standings (at least by points percentage), and have shown no signs of slowing down. That's a far cry from where they were way back in October during my first update, where a slow start had people questioning a lot about the team. Now the only question is whether the team can still avoid the dreaded 'regression,' dropping like other teams of the past. As usual, Rob already covered that again with the shot metrics, so I'm just filling in the rest, with the season data on scoring chances.

Typically with these summaries, I start with the goaltending and then bombard the rest of the post with more tables. I just posted a lot of the data recently with the chance types, so for a change of pace, this time I'm going to instead bombard the post with pretty pictures charts. Here's one such chart:

This will look familiar to a select few of you, as it is an update of one I posted a month ago. This shows the 10 game ratio of each of the important shot ratios, goals, Fenwick, Corsi, and scoring chances (all even strength data). For the most part, shots and scoring chances have been tied fairly closely all season, an indication that 'shot quality' is still not really a driving force for their domination in goals. That credit still goes to Henrik Lundqvist and Martin Biron. Even with the goaltending, it's important to get the better of the shots over the course of the year, as the correlation between goals or shots and scoring chances is quite high the later you get in the year. That 52.6% they're at now is perfectly acceptable for that goal, and where they need to remain.

After the jump, more charts!

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The midpoint in the season is always a good time to start reviewing what has happened and start looking towards the last half and the season the playoff push. We'll start that review looking at the types of chances each player has been on ice for, as we've looked at in the previous individual chance update . As I do with the regular summaries, I'll start with the goaltenders, which serves as a team summary.

Data (which does not include this past weekend) after the jump.

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Shooting trends for this team have become quite the heated topic lately. Previous posts from Rob L. have painted the picture of a team playing above it's skill level. My last post on the topic showed a team still a bit too reliant on its goaltending. Even some of the advanced stat guys are starting to make some noise about the Rangers, like Rob Vollman did with this tweet several days ago:

Now that Minnesota has plunged as us fancy-stats guys predicted maybe you'll pay attention to this: the NY Rangers are next.

If you're wondering about those past predictions, you can find stories here, and here, among other places. Like the '09 Avalanche, and '10 Stars before them, the '11 Wild are a poor possession team riding hot goaltending to a fast start, and then the bottom fell out. Not suprisingly, those fans all brought up similar counter arguments before the collapses. 'We have a system." "You can't measure a team's heart." "We limit shot quality." "Stats don't capture everything." If you've been reading the comments here lately, you've seen similar counter arguments. So why are we different? We're a better team, and I'm going to show you why.

The standard go to arguments against sustained success point to two things, Fenwick with the score Tied, and PDO. For refreshers on both: Fenwick is simply the ratio of even strength shots directed at the net for a team compared to its opponents. PDO is the total of even strength save percentage and even strength shooting percentage. For this article, in both cases, I will be using the stats under 'close' conditions. That is defined as any 1-goal game state during the first two periods, and tied game states in the 3rd. While this actually paints a darker picture for the Rangers compared to Fenwick tied, it helps expand the sample size, which is important when looking at only a half-season's worth of data.

After the jump, a comparison of all 4 teams.

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It's been a while since the last individual update, so the New Year seems like as good a time as any for the next one. For previous updates, I gave you the game by game totals, but 20 games is a lot to list, so this time around I'll just give the totals. Those curious enough to see the game logs can find it at my blog like data dump site. We saw in my shots update that the chances did trend above break even for a period of time, but they've come back down now.

*Data does not include the Winter Classic

Scoring chances for the season are still below 50%, much like the season shot totals that Rob L showed. What that tells is that contrary to some arguments, there's no noticeable difference in the shot quality being prevented by the defense, or created by the offense. Another way we can check that is by type of chance. (5v5 data only)

The New York Rangers have gotten a few more breakaways (thank you Marian Gaborik), but overall there's no discernible difference in the types allowed, and the percentage of transition chances of the two groups (43.6% for, 43.4% against) is virtually identical. The main separator, which also accounts for their record, is once again the goaltending of Henrik Lundqvist and Martin Biron. After stopping 88% of even strength chances against last year, the duo has maintained that clip through 36 games this year.

After the jump, the individual data.

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Note: Metrics do not include 12/26 vs. NYI

Since our last numbers update the Rangers have continued to find good results, going 6-2-1 in their lead up to the Christmas holiday. To summarize, the club continues to "find" ways to win with very good shooting (much of which is luck driven) and Vezina-esque goaltending (this is going to be Henrik Lunqvist's peak season in the NHL if this continues, most likely). This is still not very good news, but the overall good news since the early-December update is that the team is playing (aka outplaying opponents) better than when the season started. I know the great George has game-by-game Fenwick numbers that he can chime in with below, but for now lets take a peak at some charts (after the jump: how the Rangers are being used and I show you NYR's version of behindthetnet's Christmas present to the advanced stats community).

Oh and P.S: Dubinsky shot the puck and it went in! Amazing.

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Hockey sabermetrics are still in their infancy compared to their baseball equivalents. What that means is that every day, hockey sabermetricians are looking for new ways to evaluate what has happened on the ice. One such way is through a new metric introduced by Neil Greenberg via ESPN, called the Clutch Performance Indicator (CPI). A warning: the link unfortunately requires an ESPN Insider subscription. For those without, CPI is defined here:

Similar to "win probability added" in baseball, the Clutch Performance Indicator is derived by looking at the current game situation -- the period in which the goal was scored, the score at the time of the goal and the time remaining -- and determining what percentage chance each team has of winning the contest in that situation. The data for those percentages is based on all previous hockey games for which we have available, complete information. CPI then awards each skater a fraction of a win for each goal he is involved in, in every game he plays.

It's worth noting here that this is a measure of what a player has done in the clutch, but does not represent an ability to be clutch. While the full list not accessible thanks to ESPN's 'wonderful' internal policies, Neil was generous enough to provide me with a couple of key players. We'll look at the list after the jump.

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Fellow Banter author Rob L. has done an excellent job keeping fans updated on the performance of this Rangers team according to shot metrics. As a follow up to his work, I wanted to give a more visual look at those the season has trended thus far. For starters, let's look at last year's team.

The chart (click to enlarge) represents a rolling 10 game average of each of the 4 indicated categories. The data is for even strength only. For instance, between games 50 and 60 last year, the Rangers got only 40% of the goals scored, while between 60 and 70 they were just under 60%. Ordinarily, I would use a 20 game average to smooth the data a bit, but since we have just 30 games for comparison this season, it wouldn't give us very many data points.

Though a bit cluttered, you can see that during the course of the year, the Rangers' shot metrics stayed relatively bunched all season. When Fenwick (Shots For / Shots By Both teams, excluding blocked shots) and Corsi (Fenwick + blocked shots) went up, so did their scoring chances. However, goals% was a lot more volatile. This is because over the course of the season, there is a tremendous amount of luck involved in goal scoring. That luck is captured by looking at PDO.

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