Breaking Down Wild Player Performance

By NiNY

Over at the GTRCMBSHP we were discussing the Wild's all-time career points (with the Wild) top ten list. Also known as the franchise scoring leaders.

Currently that list is:

1. Gaborik 437pts
2. Koivu 361
3. Bouchard 327
4. Brunette 321
5. Rolston 202
6. Burns 183
7. Walz 182
8. Dupuis 141
9. Kuba 132
10. Schultz 128

Nice enough list. If W was still the Prez. Considering how well the team is playing of late, it speaks to what Fletcher has had to do to overhaul the lineup, and how well his hard work is finally paying off.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about how our players are performing this season, as compared to their careers-to-date.

So I annualized their season-to-date points to an 82-game schedule ((points/GP*82), then I annualized their career-to-date points to an 82-game schedule ((career points/career GP)*82). Then I ran the differential (season annualized points - career annualized points). Here's what I came up with.

(Ranked by season-to-date points lead)

1. Koivu on pace for 68.86, career avg 61.06, +6.80 (11.13%)
2. Suter on pace for 67.86, career avg 37.63, +30.24 (80.36%)
3. Parise on pace for 65.03, career avg 66.87, -1.83 (-2.74%)
4. Setoguchi on pace for 56.55, career avg 48.30, +8.25 (17.08%)
5. Cullen on pace for 56.55, career avg 42.93, +13.62 (31.72%)
6. Heatley on pace for 48.07, career avg 79.79, -31.72 (-39.76%)
7. Bouchard on pace for 41.00, career avg 50.91, -9.91 (-19.47%)
8. Gilbert on pace for 28.38, career avg 32.80, -4.42 (-13.46%)
9. Spurgeon on pace for 32.880, career avg 24.66, +8.14 (33.02%)
10. Brodziak on pace for 19.79, career avg 32.76, -12.97 (-39.59%)

After that you start to get into the rookies, but here are the other upper classmen of note:

14. Clutterbuck on pace for 17.83, career avg 26.33, -8.50 (-32.30%)
16. Stoner on pace for 14.14, career avg 11.88, +2.26 (19.05%)
17. Mitchell on pace for 12.15, career avg 20.57, -8.42 (-40.93%)
18. Rupp on pace for 9.46, career avg 13.64, -4.18 (-30.65%)
21. Konopka on pace for 0.00, career avg 8.11, -8.11 (-100.00%)

Falk, Scandella and Prosser have enough games to do this, but they're not really counted on for offense so they get a pass.

What's interesting to me are how the overall team average is negative, even though the net (no pun intended) results are obviously good.

Heatley clearly stands out, but is off-set by Suter. Brodziak is down, but you have to think last year was the aberration (contract year) and that's bringing his career numbers up artificially. Mitchell is down from his career numbers, but the Sharks scored more than we do as a team so that's not a totally fair comparison. The other way to think about this is that we're scoring more or less as much as we should be, based on historical performances.