So far, the analytics community contributing to Rob Vollman’s Hockey Abstract has done little to convince anyone of their status as a possible home-seed in the postseason. There’s been a lot of be skeptical about. Even without the tables and numbers, there are a few of us at HW that are peering at the 2017-18 Minnesota Wild, not entirely sure of what exactly “got better” for them.
In the first two stories, I covered Minnesota’s possession, shootout ability, goaltending, and their penalty kill. Apart from Dubnyk holding down the fort and giving the Wild a seventh-best ranking of the, now, 31 NHL teams, all other parts of Vollman and Friends’ ranking criteria show the Wild as an average team.