The Southeast Division's Top Ten Forwards

D vs. F is apples to oranges.

Within the F group, if you have a guy that can play a higher leverage position as well as he can play a lower leverage position, you play him at the higher leverage position, no?

But of course he does.

Another point on Staal vs. Semin – Staal has done what he has done while being the primary/only target of opposing defenses, while Semin has been able to do what he’s done with defenses focusing on Ovechkin.

Just wondering, what do you consider awesome? Crosby’s series have been:

’07 vs OTT – 5 GP, 3 G, 2 A
’08 vs OTT – 4 GP, 2 G, 6 A
’08 vs NYR – 5 GP, 0 G, 6 A
’08 vs PHI – 5 GP, 2 G, 5 A
’08 vs DET – 6 GP, 2 G, 4 A
’09 vs PHI – 6 GP, 4 G, 4 A
’09 vs WSH – 7 GP, 8 G, 5 A
’09 vs CAR – 4 GP, 2 G, 5 A
’09 vs DET – 7 GP, 1 G, 2 A
’10 vs OTT – 6 GP, 5 G, 9 A
’10 vs MTL – 7 GP, 1 G, 4 A

In 11 series, he has had 2 goals or less 7 times. He has had 1 PPG or less 5 times, which is significantly below his career regular season average of 1.36. In fact, he has only topped that in 5 of the 11 series.

In his defense, he has contributed in other ways – but has hardly been “almost always awesome”.

For sure. Semin has a looooong way to go before he catches up to Sid in playoff performance, he either needs a huge number of good-to-brilliant series in a row or Crosby needs to start failing to produce more often while Semin plays his series roughly in proportion to his regular season games.
I’d be happier with Semin producing (with a weagle on), but I wouldn’t turn down either result.

Sid has played 11 NHL playoff series. By my count, he has had two “bad” series – Detroit (when they won anyway) and Montreal last year (when they didn’t).

I’d take that consistency.

A large number of his shots in the playoffs came in that situation you just described for the regular season. I believe most of those were on the PP though, while on ES he tended to do the second more.

It’s all about the goalie getting set, though, and I’m fairly sure Semin isn’t beating goalies with shots before they can get set, regular season or playoffs. We’ve seen his wrister just be too fast for goalies to properly react to. The reason why that changed I don’t think is whether the puck was cycled or rushed in. The bigger difference I’d say is traffic and where Flash was playing (center, wing, or on another line).

There are a few potential causes for Semin not scoring a goal with some overlap and some causality (e.g. having bad luck could cause a player to play on the perimeter more):

Hot Goalie

Bad Luck (stick breaks, pass hops over stick, ref decides you were interfering with the goalie when 50% of the time it isn’t called, )

Lack of Good Luck (e.g. no odd bounces off defensemen’s shin guards on missed shot going wide)

Binomial Statistical Distribution. (If a player shoots 10% (and one shot is independent of the last), the chance of him not scoring even when he gets 10 shots is still 34%)

Player Changes game to ineffective style of play, either because it is the playoffs and he thinks he needs to change (this is my mike green theory)

Player has style of play that is ineffective against a certain team’s Defense and does not adjust at all or his adjustments don’t do anything effective

I would say semin had no good luck and ran into a hot goalie. I dont remember if he had any particular bad luck

Here comes the deluge of comments about where he was shooting from and CORSI and zone starts and the referreeing crew and how the scorekeeper isn’t behind the net anymore.

I just wanted to point out that I enjoy having a poster named MikeyGreen argue on this side of the playoff performance issue.

I think Crosby had pretty much the same kind of problem as Ovie, where Montreal had Gill on him constantly. With Crosby being considerably smaller than Ovie and shooting from much closer most of the time, I think that strategy was more effective. I would like to see how many of Crosby’s shots were blocked though, because that is potentially a big factor.

According to your definition, no he wasn’t. He was the most effective Cap at creating chances, he just wasn’t converting due to a number of factors – mainly ones that were on him, but a few that were on linemates. Semin had a similar situation to Malkin. The Montreal defense focused on Ovie, which opened chances up for Semin – and like Malkin, he got stopped by Halak.