Saturday, February 02, 2008

Kolzig To Start Against Thrashers

According to Tarik, Olie Kolzig - not Brent Johnson - will get tonight's start against Atlanta.

As noted earlier, Kolzig is 1-1-0 with a 4.01 goals against average and an .843 save percentage against Atlanta this season, 14-11-4-2/2.77/.903 in his career, while Johnson is 1-0-1/1.48/.950 opposite the Thrashers so far in 2007-08 and 7-2-0-2/2.32/.918 in his career. Johnny's save percentage is .024 better than Kolzig's and his GAA is 0.38 goals per game better than Olie's on the season, and the two goalies are seemingly headed in different directions, as the two charts below show.


In this huge intra-divisional match up, I guess the coach is playing a hunch, because he sure ain't playing the numbers.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

yea i dont really know what to say about that, except they better effing win. and if they dont, it better not be olie's fault, cause this is the last straw.

FAUX RUMORS said...

1) One has to at least wonder IF perhaps the decision on who is getting the start in goal wasn't 'suggested' by someone other than Boudreau?
2) Even the choice to continue to not dress Eminger after the Hanlon firing seems to have come from above. After all its not like the guys who were playing in place of Eminger(Erskine/Schultz/Jurcina) were playing Norris caliber defense.

Unknown said...

I think that all proves Obama's in for a big Super Tuesday.

Oh, wait, that wasn't polling data?

Unknown said...

BTW, could someone email this post to Tarik?

Whiter Mage said...

You can't say Olie lost the game tonight.

You can say that Lehtonen won it.

And that "Dive" on Semin was atrocious. I cringed. My dad(a non hockey person) looked up, and when I said they called it a dive, he himself said something to the tune of "that's bullshit."

Anonymous said...

Naughty naughty, JP. You've committed the Cardinal Sin of Data Charting: Fiddling with the scale so that the chart does not start with "0" at the bottom.

For instance, the line showing Olie's plummeting save percentage winds up near the bottom of your graph, exaggerating the drop-off in his performance and giving the visual impression of complete goaltending incompetence.

The reality of Olie's stats this season still isn't pretty, but the selective scale of your charts make it look far worse than it is.

JP said...

Cardinal Sin? Not really - the numbers are there for all to see. Far from a sin, the technique is employed to emphasize the point one is trying to make. I could have included a range from 0-100 on GAA and stretched the chart horizontally to "show" that Olie's numbers aren't tailing off all that much, but that wouldn't quite make my point, would it?

Bottom line: the numbers don't lie, and they're all there.