Here's something that's been discussed a lot, how much do faceoffs mean to a team? What I did was I took ten games at random (please don`t ask about the process of picking the games at random, it was quite tedious) and what I`m gonna do is look at each of the ten games and look at Faceoffs vs. shots time vs. the final score.
Dallas/Colorado march 20th
Dallas Colorado
Faceoff % 52% 48%
Shots 32 34
Score 3 4
Pittsburgh/Carolina april 9th
Pittsburgh Carolina
Faceoff% 41% 59%
Shots 33 28
Score 5 3
Calgary/Minnesota april 21st
Calgary Minnesota
Faceoff% 41% 59%
Shots 24 35
Score 4 1
New Jersey/Rangers april 21st
New Jersey Rangers
Faceoff% 52% 48%
Shots 27 22
Score 1 4
Minnesota/Calgary feb 23rd
Minnesota Calgary
Faceoff% 59% 41%
Shots 31 27
Score 1 3
Ottawa/Montreal mar 13
Ottawa Montreal
Faceoff% 53% 47%
Shots 32 45
Score 3 4
Okay, so I was going to do 10, but I stopped after six because it became clear to me there was no coherent pattern between faceoffs and wins. This confused me because when you watch a hockey game or listen to analysis you always here about how important faceoffs are. I do have one more thing to consider though, faceoff success at one end of the ice.
In 5/6 of these games the winning team had close to or better than 50% faceoffs in the defensive zone. This makes sense because if you can stop the other team from getting posession in their offensive end you'll stop scoring. Defensive faceoffs are more important.
While there may be no direct correlation between faceoffs and winning, you can bet defensive faceoffs are more important.
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