New York Rangers' Scoring Chances From the Trip That Was

The struggles of the team throughout the seven game, three country road trip have been well documented. Needless to say, the scoring chances picture does not paint any rosier a picture. The New York Rangers as a team last year averaged 16.5 chances per game last season, yet they failed to get more than 15 in any game on the trip. The game by game totals are as follows:

Clarifying one point on the table that often leads to confusion, the totals are all shown from the point of view of the Rangers.  Thus under PP, the Rangers had 17 PP chances for, and 7 against, while shorthanded they had 5 chances while allowing 31.   A small positive here is they were able to play relatively even at even strength up until the last two games of the trip, where the time on the road may have finally taken its toll.   At least, that's what one can hope the narrative is, as the last two performances were quite poor.

After the jump, you can find the individual performances.

*Data here is 5v5 only. Tables are sortable by clicking the headers*

Again, as we compare to last year's season totals, we see that the performance has been well below the standard they previously set. The forwards, who averaged 14.08 chances per 60 last season, are down nearly 5 chances. Their conversion rate is down, from 13% last season to 11.75 so far this season. Every single forward, with the exception of one, is down so far this year. No, the improved forward is not Marian Gaborik. He has looked spectacular so far, but he's actually down ever so slightly from 6.853 chances last year, to 6.731 now. The actual improved forward is Brandon Prust, whose play has been good enough to earn him first line minutes on occasion.

If you recall from the game 1 summary, for this season I added the scoring chance assist, which does help shed more light on who has been involved in getting chances. For instance, Derek Stepan would look much worse by mere shots, but he has set up a team high 7 scoring chances so far, which does have value. While there is no data to compare it to for last season, with chances being down, it stands to reason the assists are as well.

What we can gather from the data though is there does seem to be an early standard, where most players are around 4.5-5.5 plays per 60 minutes. The exceptions on the high side are Gaborik and Brian Boyle, while on the low side are the 4th line boys, like Mike Rupp, Erik Christensen, and Ryan Callahan. Wait what? Yes, Captain Cally has contributed very little so far. To be fair, he does have 2 goals this season, 1 at even strength, of which neither were considered scoring chances. They were the result of a sharp, almost impossible angle shot, and a fortuitous bounce on a pass.

There's not much to talk about defensively, as it has been Ryan McDonagh and little else, from a unit producing half as many chances as they did last year.

One final table here, as we look at the types of chances that have been generated through seven games:

I've separated my classifications into two groups here.  Zone Entries are those that originate from beyond the offensive zone and lead to chances in transition, while Zone Pressure totals encompass all those that come from offensive zone/forechecking pressure.  The purpose here is to weed out a little bit of the 'scorer error.'  Gray areas, like a 2 on 1 with a backchecker that catches up, are hard to consistently designate, so this helps smooth some of the discrepancies between one category or another.

The little data I have to go by, from the playoff series with Washington last season, shows similar results to these, with 55-60% of the Rangers' chances coming from zone pressure.   Aside from that, it's too early to draw conclusions, but with the low overall totals so far, it will be interesting to see if and how the ratio shifts when the team sees more success offensively.

Any questions?  Fire away in the comments.