The Chicago Blackhawks have more talent than the Arizona Coyotes, yes. The baseline for every team or player probably is not 100%. So here’s where things get interesting, and where I always got a little hung up: what I just said above isn’t 100% true. That’s the nature of the game – regression to the mean is a statistical fact. Your incredible goaltending will falter, your super-lucky “shot quality” will come down. So every team in a league will ultimately regress toward a PDO of 100.0.
The baseline for this stat is 100.0, because that’s the league average – always was and always will be (the average of all shot percentages in the league plus the average of all save percentages will always be 100%). Puckology has a great post on this. PDO adds the team shooting percentage and save percentage into one stat. The stat that measures all of that, of course, is PDO. 925 simply isn’t sustainable for most goalies. If your team has a high shooting percentage, it’s likely to regress the more they play. The next thing everyone always brings up is, “yeah but shot quality.” Sorry, but shot quality is not a game plan, nor something even the best players can sustain. More possession, more shots, more goals, more wins. Of the 39 other teams, 10% made the tournament (4/39). Though if you’d like to be spared from an RL article, I’ll just say this: of the top 20 CF% teams in the NCAA, 60% made the tournament (12/20). Corsi is real, and it’s here to stay – yes, even in college hockey. Ryan Lambert at College Hockey News pretty much dropped the mic on the issue as the 2015 conference tournaments started, so I won’t waste any more words on it. If you’re not convinced by now that puck possession matters, you might as well go ahead and close this tab.