Why are the Tampa Bay Lightning so Good? Part 2

After part 1, I am just getting started. There are still many other stats to talk about. Today we are going to finish off the 2019-20 regular season.

Stamkos celebrating a goal. Source: news4jax.com (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

In the last blog I made about this, all I mostly talked about was faceoffs. Now, faceoffs aren’t the only important stat in the sport of hockey. In the last part of this, I told you my list of the most important stats in the game of hockey. There is one stat I left out, and that is Corsi. Corsi is the combination of shots, shot misses, and blocks by one team, so basically the shot attempts. One wants to have about a Corsi of 40-60 and 50 and above means you had a better Corsi than the other team.

The first thing I am going to look at is shots because you can’t score goals unless you hit the net. Tampa got more shots than their opponent 32 times, just short of the halfway mark as Tampa played 70 games in the 2019-20 season. Of those 32 times, Tampa won the game 18 times, more than half of the games. In total, Tampa went 18-11-3, a total of 39 points in 32 games. One reason why Tampa was so good was that they managed to get many shots each and every game. Of the 70 games Tampa played that year, 41 of those games they had 30 or more shots. In those 41 games, they went 25-13-3. Another amazing discovery was the relationship between home and away games when they had more shots. 20 of the times when they had more shots, it was at home. Tampa only played 34 home games that season, so only 14 times at home they did not have more shots than the other team. So if you subtract the number of times they had more shots by how many were at home (32-20), that means 12 of those games were at a visiting arena. Of those 20 games, Tampa won the game 11 times. So this shows that home-ice advantage might actually be true.

Tampa had an average of more shots than their opposing team, but just by a little bit. Tampa averaged a total of around 31.09 shots, and their opponent averaged 30.99 shots. Tampa also had fewer shots, but a better shooting percentage than the league average. Tampa had a total of 2176 shots with an 11.2% shooting percentage. The league average for shots was 2192, so about 15 more than Tampa’s total number of shots. But, the league average for shooting percentage was 9.5% so Tampa shot about 1% better than the league average. Nikita Kucherov led the team in shots with 210 shots, over 30 shots ahead of second place, Steven Stamkos. Alex Killorn also led the team with a 20% shooting percentage (not counting Gemel Smith as he only played 3 games and scored a goal on his only shot). Killorn could’ve also led the league in shooting percentage based on what minimum number of games you wanted.

So I think that is enough talking about shots, now let’s go onto the penalty minutes. Tampa had more penalty minutes than the other team 34 times, which means they had fewer penalty minutes, or they tied 36 times. Which is a good sign. You don’t want to get more penalty minutes than the other team half of the time. One thing that isn’t a good sign is that Tampa never had 0 penalties in a game. They always had at least one penalty. But don’t get penalty minutes confused with penalties. If you have more penalty minutes, that doesn’t necessarily mean you had more penalties. You could get a 5 minute for checking from behind and the other team got 2 tripping penalties. Now you had 5 penalty minutes and they only had 4 but you had fewer penalties than the other team. On average, Tampa got about 10.55 penalty minutes per game. So if that was all 2-minute penalties, we can guess that Tampa got around 5 penalties a game. Their opponent got about 9.86 penalty minutes per game. So we can guess that they got around 4 penalties a game.

Now one thing that is crucial is how you respond to those penalties that the other team gave you. Now that they got a penalty, you get an advantage for 2-5 minutes. So you need to capitalize off of their mistake. Tampa went on the power play a total of 211 times during the 2019-20 season. Of those 211 times, they scored only 49 times. That made their power play percentage 23.2%, good enough for 5th in the league. However, those 211 power-play opportunities put them in 14th in the league. On average, Tampa would score 0.7 power-play goals per game in 3.01 power-play opportunities. Their opponents had 231 power-play opportunities, which would put them fourth in the league. But Tampa’s penalty-killing unit showed up, allowing only 44 goals from their opponents. That got them a 19.1% power-play percentage. They would put them 18th in the league. Tampa’s opponents would only score 0.63 power-play goals per game in 3.3 opportunities which would put them below the Lightning.

Tampa’s penalty kill wouldn’t be as high on the charts as you'd think though. Their penalty kill had a success rate of 81.4% and that would only place them at 14th in the league. Their opponents had a penalty kill percentage of 80.9% and would be right behind the Lightning in 15th. So, I’m about to tell you why the power-play is important. So yesterday, I had 2 games. In one of the games we took so many penalties, I think the other team had 3-4 power plays. The problem was, they couldn’t score on the power-play. I scored on the penalty kill and they couldn’t score on the power-play. They lost 2-0 and one of the reasons they lost was because they could capitalize on the opportunities we gave them. Now, to be fair, we couldn’t score on the power play either and went 0/3 the second game and we lost 0-1. But you get my point.

The last thing we are going to look at today is Corsi. More specifically, the Corsi For percentage. The Corsi For percentage is the number of times the team had a scoring opportunity by shooting. The higher the Corsi, the better. If you have higher than 50%, that means you had more scoring opportunities than the other team. 42 times Tampa did just that. That is almost 10 more than half the games that season. Tampa’s highest Corsi For in a game was a 4-3 OT win against the Ottawa Senators on December 17. Tampa’s Corsi For that game was 71.7% totaling 76 opportunities for Tampa and only 30 for Ottawa. Of those 42 games where they had the better Corsi For, they won 24 of those games. Now, statistically, when a team has a higher Corsi For percentage than the other team, you should win the game. But realistically, it’s really hard to do that. The reason is that sometimes you run into a hot goalie or you have bad puck luck.

That’s all the words I got for today. The next part of this series would be the 2020 playoffs.

Stats from: hockey-reference.com