More Correlated Ice Time: Even Strength

I want to highlight a little more about the even-strength numbers that JavaGeek pulled about Ducks and their ice time. The theory is that looking at scoring trends while players play together (vs. how they score when apart), you can get a sense of ‘contributors’ vs. ‘borrowers’. Last post I introduced the idea in looking at Selanne and McDonald.

I’m going to pick on recently departed Joffrey Lupul a bit here, not particularly out of post-trade maliciousness, but since he is such a good counter-example for Teemu. The table below shows players who shared ice time with Selanne and Lupul. The first row reads like this:

Andy McDonald spent 77% of his even-strength ice time with Teemu Selanne, where he had 93% of his ‘plus’ events and 83% of his ‘minus’ events. He also spent 7% of his even-strength ice time with Joffrey Lupul, where he had 5% of his ‘plus’ events and 20% of his ‘minus’ events*.

	with Selanne			with Lupul
Player	IceTime	+ Events	- Events	IceTime	+ Events	- Events
Andy McDonald	77%	93%	83%	7%	5%	20%
Chris Kunitz	46%	57%	39%	30%	26%	36%
Todd Marchant	5%	14%	0%	69%	66%	85%
Rob Niedermayer	6%	7%	6%	22%	19%	32%
Todd Fedoruk	23%	47%	23%	10%	7%	14%
Sammy Pahlsson	9%	16%	14%	15%	10%	8%
Dustin Penner	23%	43%	0%	61%	57%	75%
Scott Niedermayer	27%	50%	32%	32%	28%	38%
Francois Beauchemin	26%	56%	28%	27%	18%	31%
Ruslan Salei	26%	43%	27%	32%	30%	32%
Sean O’Donnell	24%	33%	0%	31%	8%	63%
Vitaly Vishnevski	29%	47%	27%	20%	13%	20%
Joe Dipenta	30%	36%	26%	19%	12%	32%
Keith Carney	27%	36%	24%	31%	33%	39%

These stats are ridiculous. Everyone benefited offensively from Teemu’s presence, whereas Joffrey appears to have been a bit of a wet sponge. Granted, I don’t believe these numbers are playoff-inclusive, but his numbers don't suggest strong even-strength production, despite the lofty goal total.

But this really is where I have a question. How much of this is because of opposition and line-matching?

Can it really be true that Teemu makes everyone that much better, or is it likely that players benefit from playing first-line ice time (and the strategy or match-ups that come with it)?

Hockey theorists, answer away!

* I would suspect that the high pct. of ‘minus’ events in this case comes from the fact that Lupul and McDonald would probably only play time together when the goalie was pulled, and thus they would suffer many ‘minus’ empty-netters against while sharing limited ice time.