Prospectively, Carolina has seven NHL-level defensemen on the roster heading into training camp (could be more if some of the younger players impress in camp) and only six spots available to play on opening night. With spots guaranteed to guys like Joni Pitkanen, Tomas Kaberle, Tim Gleason, Bryan Allen and possibly Jamie McBain, that leaves only one space for one of Derek Joslin and Jay Harrison. Who should play there? If you have looked at some analysis I've done on the defense, I've said quite a few things about both defensemen. In my post on scoring chances, I said that Joslin deserved a spot to start the season because of his impressive scoring chance ratio. However, you could make a case for Harrison starting, as well because he has done just about everything you can ask for as a third-pairing defenseman. If he wants to find himself not in the press box on opening night, he may have to go above and beyond.

The Canes special teams struggled a lot last season and I've already dissected the powerplay a bit the past few weeks but improving the penalty kill may be a more serious issue. The Canes penalty kill might have been 20th in the NHL last season in terms of efficency (which still isn't that good) but they were next to last in terms of shots surrendered. Only the Phoenix Coyotes had a worse penalty kill than Carolina and their's was horrendous. That shows a real cause for concern so I'm going to look deeper into the Canes penalty kill similar to how I dissected the team's powerplay by looking at the team's top penalty killers and which ones gave up more chances than others. Seeing how many chances were surrendered on the penalty kill should tell us if the Canes were really as bad a man down as the numbers indicate.

Now that I have all of the team's scoring chances from last year tracked, I thought it would be a good idea to take how some individual players performed over the season starting with the captain himself, Eric Staal. If you remember my original scoring chance post, Staal was the only regular forward to have a chance ratio of over .500 and was the best player on the team not named Cam Ward. I am of the belief that great centers can make their linemates better and my opinion is only strengthened after seeing how well so many players performed when they were on Staal's line. He is the key piece of this team and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. 

I've talked a bit about scoring chances on this blog and how important they are when it comes to determining how much success a team has. If you don't remember what a scoring chance is, then I'll give you a brief explanation. It's a shot directed at the opponent's net from a dangerous scoring area and it includes missed and blocked shots. The exact "scoring chance area" is debated over by several bloggers but the general idea is that it's the area in front of the net to the top of the face-off circles from inside the two face-off dots. This picture courtesy of Arctic Ice Hockey explains it better. It is similar to corsi only we use shots that were counted as scoring chances instead of shots in general so we know which players are creating offense better than others. Corsi is a great system for measuring possession numbers, but scoring chances gives you a better idea of which players are producing better than others and which ones are getting lucky or unlucky.

Most teams have statisticians who track numbers officially for their respective teams and this has slowly been gaining popularity on the blogosphere, too. Bloggers who currently track chances for their teams are Derek Zona at Litter Box Cats (Florida Panthers), Dennis King at MC79hockey.com (Edmonton Oilers), Neil Greenberg at Russian Machine Never Breaks (Washington Capitals), Kent Wilson at Flames Nation (Calgary Flames), Eric T. at Broad Street Hockey (Philadelphia Flyers), George Ays at Blueshirt Banter (New York Rangers), Oliver at En attendant les Nordiques (Montreal Canadiens), the people at Under The Helmet of Slava Duris (Toronto Maple Leafs) and I will be doing it for the Canes on this blog for this upcoming season.

Doing this for the most recent Hurricanes season was a bit difficult because I don't have all 82 games available for me to watch on demand (although that would be sweet) but what I do have is access to every game's shot charts on NHL.com and Vic Ferrari's awesome scoring chance script at Time On Ice to help me do this project. So, we are looking at scoring chance data based on shots on goal instead of shots directed at the net. It's a little rought but I think the data does give a good general idea of who was producing more than others. You have to take things like zone starts, playing time, quality of competition and a player's performance in comparison to the rest of the team into context with these numbers, too. Without further ado, are the scoring chance numbers for the Canes: