People were railing on the Canucks about PDO, unsustainable shooting, unsustainable goaltending, etc. It is hard to say right now anything definitively. You get weird mirages in the numbers in small samples. IE... they've played one of the best teams analytically (Oilers) 3 times so 19% of the games they should have been dominated. Then you have weird quirks like winning 10-1 in a game that was never close, but having a 41% xGF. The biggest thing they do is score first and if they get up by 2 or more, they turtle like mad.
What they have in spades is high end talent. Petey, Miller and Hughes are legit elite players in the league. Demko if healthy is an elite goalie. Petey shooting at 17% isn't unsustainable for him. Miller will regress from 27 and probably fill in around 15-16... but he's likely to also pick up a half shot a game to even that out. Hughes has always been an elite playmaker... now he's added the goal scoring too. His shot is night and day better... so odds are he regresses from 11, but 9 seems reasonable. They also have a great mix of complementary talent that is high end, Hronek, Boeser, Kuzmenko... all great players.
Additionally, we just don't have enough games to see where things fall. If you look at the last two weeks... they are near or in the top 10 in many categories. But if you look at them in October, they look like a fringe bottom 10 team. Are they actually improving and playing better to prop up the hot shooting regression or is this a blip? Like I can go back and say their All Situations xGF% has been over 50% in 9 of their last 12 and 6 of those 9 have been over 55%. That signals a team that should be expected to win a lot of games and probably pushing a ~.650 p%. Not as high as they are... but in the realm of one or two games swaying that. You can also clearly see that they have a heavy reliance on goalies stopping dangerous shots, and many times that does not hold up unless you have a Vezina type goalie in net (which remains to be seen if Demko can do that for a whole year)
What they have in spades is high end talent. Petey, Miller and Hughes are legit elite players in the league. Demko if healthy is an elite goalie. Petey shooting at 17% isn't unsustainable for him. Miller will regress from 27 and probably fill in around 15-16... but he's likely to also pick up a half shot a game to even that out. Hughes has always been an elite playmaker... now he's added the goal scoring too. His shot is night and day better... so odds are he regresses from 11, but 9 seems reasonable. They also have a great mix of complementary talent that is high end, Hronek, Boeser, Kuzmenko... all great players.
Additionally, we just don't have enough games to see where things fall. If you look at the last two weeks... they are near or in the top 10 in many categories. But if you look at them in October, they look like a fringe bottom 10 team. Are they actually improving and playing better to prop up the hot shooting regression or is this a blip? Like I can go back and say their All Situations xGF% has been over 50% in 9 of their last 12 and 6 of those 9 have been over 55%. That signals a team that should be expected to win a lot of games and probably pushing a ~.650 p%. Not as high as they are... but in the realm of one or two games swaying that. You can also clearly see that they have a heavy reliance on goalies stopping dangerous shots, and many times that does not hold up unless you have a Vezina type goalie in net (which remains to be seen if Demko can do that for a whole year)
