Nitzy's Hockey Den

I have heard alot of talk this week about how Steve Stamkos is on such a torrid pace since the end of last season. I decided to look at the goal leaders simce last season's all-star break, approximately three quarters of a season of games. These stats are as of Nov 25. Stamkos does actually rate quite high with 32 goals in his last 55 games behind the usual suspects, Ovechkin, Kovalchuk and Heatley and tied with Jarome Iginla, another proven scorer. In fact, of the 18 names on the list, 10 are 25 years of age or younger and all but one are 30 or under. Only the somewhat surprising Jason Arnott is older than 35. The one number that really jumps out is Marian Gaborik's games played in the time in question. He has fired his 28 goals since the break in a mere 32 games for a Goals/Game rate of 0.875 better even than Ovechkin's 0.804 and Kovalchuk's 0.800. A Goals/GP rate of 0.800 translates to a 65 goal pace for an entire season. There have been three 65 goal scorers in o...

This past weekend, I had a nice surprise at the grocery store. On Saturday morning I popped into my local Sav-On Foods to pick up some capocoli and provolone and low and behold, there sitting at a table at the end of the dairy aisle was Hockey Hall of Famer Henri Richard. He and fellow ex-Montreal Canadien Yvon Lambert were in town for that evenings' Vancouver Giants game and were signing free autographs in the store. Now, I am far from a Habs fan, but I can appreciate and respect the presence of fifteen Stanley Cup rings in front of me. (not actually all the rings were there, but Lambert did have two of his four rings on his fingers). Henri Richard, the man who has won the most Cups as a player in history was not wearing any of his eleven rings. Both gentleman were cordial as I tried some of my grade 12 French. I told Henri it was a pleasure to meet a winner of "onze Coupe de Stanley". I was somewhat surprised when I checked Yvon Lambert's stats later and saw he had...

My last post dealt with the greatest backup goalies of all-time. In looking at the stats, I found out that the one and only Corey Schwab posted the lowest single season goals against average by a goalie playing in a minimum of ten games since the 1920’s. In 2002/03 he had a 1.47 GAA in 11 games. I found another even more obscure stat about Schwab. It seems he had the greatest WINLESS season in NHL history. Schwab produced the best season ever among goalies that did not collect a win while playing at least ten games. In 1995/96 he had a 2.18 average over 10 official games with a 0-3-0 record. He did however play only 331 total minutes over those 10 appearances so honourable mention for best winless season ever goes to Jamie Storr. In 2003/04 with Carolina, Storr went 0-8-2 with a 2.91 GAA while playing 660 minutes. It’s quite difficult keep a respectable average when you lose pretty much every game. Case in point would be Michel Belhumeur of the expansion Washington Capitals in 74/75....

Last week, on the way to hockey, my pal Geoff (he did the great painting above of Bunny Larocque years ago in art school) and I were discussing great backup goalies of all time. I figured I’d try to dig up some numbers on some of the all-time best second string goalies. I determined a back-up as a goalie playing less than 30 games behind a legitimate number one goalie that played the remainder of the time. In other words, if a team has an even split between two or even three goalies, none of them are considered a backup. 1950’s and 60’s The practice of periodically giving the starting goaltender a rest didn’t really come into fashion until the middle 1960’s. There were instances in which a team would simply split the games between two goalie’s only because neither was quite ready or talented enough for the solo role. The 5th place Boston Bruins of 1959/60 would be an example of this with Harry Lumley playing 42 games to Don Simmons’ 28. As well that year, the last place Rangers used Gu...

Sometimes I’ll notice something statistically that just seems rare or out of place. The dictionary calls this an anomaly; “a deviation from the common rule and an odd, peculiar, or strange condition, situation, quality.” I love finding these little quirks in hockey history. Thanks to the great sites, hockeydb.com and hockey-reference.com I can then go delve further into these anomalies. I don’t know why, but I was just looking at Tim Horton’s career numbers and noticed he once finished third in the NHL in game winning goals with seven of them in 1963/64. Now, we all know Tim Horton was not known for his goal scoring having topped ten in a year only three times in 22 full seasons. In fact he scored 115 goals total. The game winning goal stat was not officially kept until the same season of Horton’s third place finish behind Boom Boom Geoffrion (9) and Ken Wharram (8). From this year onward, Horton would score only 16 GWG’s in eleven seasons with seven of them in 63/64. This seemed like ...