James Mirtle tweeted about the Leafs suddenly stand-out rookie d-man Carl Gunnarsson today. The positive press made me check his underlying numbers because when you have unusually good results for a young no-name player, it typically means the hockey gods are throwing the guy some love.
Turns out that's the case with Gunnarsson this year. He has the leafs highest PDO (on-ice SH% and SV%) at 102 according to behind the net. The timeonice app, which restricts inquiries slightly differently than behindthenet, has it even higher at 106 (Sv5 of .950! and SV of 11.5%). The Leafs team-wide average is (90.1 + 7.1%) 97.2, putting Gunnarsson some 9.3 percentage points above the teams PDO - that's huge and almost certainly all randomness (unless you think the Leafs have found the biggest difference maker in the game since...I don't know, uh, Bobby Orr?).
It's easy enough to normalize the percentages to see what Gunnarsson's ES "expected" plus/minus would be.
ES shots on net with Gunarsson on the ice = 148
ES shots against = 121
Current plus/minus (17 GF - 6 GA) = +9
Expected GF = 148* .071 = 10
Expected GA = 121* .901 = 12
Expected ES plus/minus = -2
Delta between actual and expected = +11
So the bounces have inflated Gunnarsson's plus minus by 11 points thus far. If you wanted to compare this rate across the leafs, then you could normalize each guy's PDO to the team average. Repeat and rank.
*(Keep in mind, that's just using the timeonice information - things would be slightly different if we employed Gabe's info, which either includes or expels stuff like 4on4/3on3 data. The principle and activity would be the same, however).
