When you're making player projections, defensemen are usually the most difficult to predict because their point totals tend to be somewhat random on a year-to-year basis, especially those who don't get powerplay time. Defensemen tend take a lot of shots but a lower proportion of them actually get on goal compared to most forwards which leads to a small sample size and an unproportionate amount of goals being scored across seasons. The number of points a defenseman has is also somewhat dependent on the group of forwards playing in front of him because Tim Gleason is going to end up with more points in a season if he is playing behind Eric Staal's line than he will playing behind Tim Brent. That's just the way it is.

Regardless of that, we are going to continue to look at Rob Vollman's historical projections and see what they have in store for the Hurricanes' defensemen. The Canes didn't have one defenseman score over 10 goals or 30 points last season and their highest scoring defenseman was Jamie McBain with only 27 points. One would think that Joni Pitkanen being in the lineup for the entire year would change this but it is what it is. Will the Hurricanes get more offense from their blue line in the upcoming season? According to Vollman's projections, there are a few blue-liners who could potentially have a very good season offensively.

We will look at the individual cases after the jump.

Yesterday we took a prolonged look at the historical projections for the Carolina Hurricanes top-six forwards to get an idea of what to expect from them in the upcoming season and today, we will do the same for the team's other forwards. As of right now, many of the Hurricanes bottom-six forward spots are unknown and it's even tougher to figure out who will make the team when you consider that there will be no training camp or pre-season. We know that players like Chad LaRose, Jiri Tlusty, Patrick Dwyer, Tim Brent and maybe a couple others are likely guaranteed spots on the team but there are still a few fringe players who could end up spending most of the year in the AHL. The good news is that Rob Vollman has historical projections available for any player who has played at least one game in each of the last two seasons*, so most of Carolina's roster is in the database.

Remember, these historical projections are meant to set a high and low point for the upcoming season and are not a final projection, so it's important to take that into consideration when you go over the numbers. This is just the first step in setting my personal player projections and those should be up sometime later in the month. These projections are meant to give us a general of what to expect and set the high and low points.

After the jump, we will look at the projections for the team's depth forwards.

* Jeremy Welsh, Justin Faulk, Riley Nash and a couple others are not projected because of this.

Mid-September is usually the time of the year when I post my projections for the Hurricanes players in the upcoming season, but with the lockout now in full effect, it looks inevitable that the NHL season will begin later than the planned October 11th start date. Given that, it may seem pointless to do projections now since no one knows when the season will start or whether or not there will be any NHL season at all. Call me an optimist, but I believe that we will have an NHL season this year and there is never any harm in predicting how the season will go and how certain players will perform. With that being said, the lockout is going to have some factors that will have an impact on how the season goes.

First off, the season is going to be shortened and while you can make the argument that the regular 82-game NHL season is too long, having a season of 40-48 games can lead to some crazy things happening. A good or bad couple of weeks for a team could end up being the difference in them making the playoffs or not. We have also seem some players already sign contracts to play in other leagues and that could affect what kind of season they have once the NHL resumes if they were to suffer an injury while playing overseas. Not having training camp might also put some players a step behind if they choose not to play anywhere during the lockout, so they might have a bit of rink rust coming into the season.

Whenever the season does start, I'm willing to bet that there will be plenty of strange occurrences and we could see some new playoff teams along with a few players having very surprising years offensively. It's hard to predict who those said players will be right now but we should have a better idea of it whenever they announce a start date for the season. Until then, the best we can do is use the data from past seasons to make informed guesses about what kind of offensive production we might see from certain players this year. The raw numbers are obviously going to be off if the season is shortened, but this is exactly why most statisticians look at rates and ratios instead. Those usually give us a better idea of a player's production anyway.

The extended off-season also allows us to put more time into our projections and come up with some more sophisticated methods of predicting the upcoming season. If you remember from last season, I based most of my projections on historical similarities between players, what kind of minutes they were expected to play and how much shooting luck they had in previous seasons. This year, I'll be using a similar method but I will be taking more consideration to factors such as shot rates, shot locations and quality of teammates than I did last season. The scoring chance data I collected from last season along with Greg Sinclair's Super Shot Search will help make these projections as thorough as possible.

However, before I begin my projections, let's take a look at what some other systems are predicting for the Hurricanes this season. A good starting point would be to look at some historical comparisons derived from Rob Vollman of Hockey Abstract*. This system follows a similar method to what I did last year where it goes through years of NHL seasons to find players with similar scoring patterns and uses it as a way to find out what the minimum and maximum expectations are for a certain player. This isn't an absolute, final projection but it serves as a good starting point for prognosticating the upcoming season.

Since there is a lot of data to break down, what I'm going to do is go through the projections piece by piece based on what kind of roles the Carolina Hurricanes players are expected to have in the upcoming season, starting today with the top-six.

*If you want to take a look at Vollman's projections for every player, it is available for free on his web site here.

Determining how good of a playmaker someone is another thing that the advanced stats world has yet to really study in-depth. We always assume that most centers or elite players are great playmakers and have a positive effect on their linemates when they play together. This is something that we also assume of someone who always has a high assist total because he is apparently getting most of his points from setting up goals rather than scoring them. A player with a consistently high on-ice shooting percentage is also presumed to be a great playmaker because the team is constantly shooting at a high rate with him on the ice. Are these assumptions digging deep enough, though?

Eric T. of NHL Numbers wondered the same thing and did a massive study of how much some of the league's best players really affected their teammate's shooting percentage. He went through four years of NHL play-by-play data and determined how much of a player's on-ice shooting percentage was being driven by a player's personal shooting percentage, his teammates and his own playmaking skills. If you look at the article you'll see some terrific work done to analyze the playmaking impact of players such as Henrik Sedin, Brad Richards, Ryan Getzlaf and many others but one name absent from this list is Eric Staal.

I think most people will agree that Staal is one of the better playmaking centers in the league. His on-ice shooting percentage isn't always ridiculously high (save for the 2009-10 season) but he is always getting a ton of points from assists and he is a very skilled passer. I don't think anyone can deny that Staal makes his teammates better and we know he does that going by the rate they control scoring chances when they play on his line, but it would be nice to know how much better they are in terms of goals. I've always wondered how many more goals a Carolina winger is more likely to score when he plays with Staal than he does when playing with someone like Jussi Jokinen or Tuomo Ruutu.

While we may not be able to find that out, what we can do is follow the steps that Eric T. did in his article and apply it to Eric Staal to see how much of an impact he had on his teammate's shooting percentage. By doing this, we can see how many more goals his teammates scored with Staal than they would have by playing with someone who was just an average playmaker. A look at this data is coming after the jump.

The key pieces of Carolina's roster are all locked in and while this team looks considerably improved compared to last season, there is still a lot of concerns with the defense, and rightfully so. The Canes were one of the worst teams in the NHL last season when it came to team defense (shots allowed, penalty killing, etc.) and not much was done over the off-season to improve it. The only players who were brought in were Joe Corvo and Marc-Andre Gragnani, the latter is probably going to spend a lot of time in Charlotte or the press box. You can try to rationalize this all you want, but the fact remains that this is a weak looking defense corps on paper.

Yes, having Joni Pitkanen in the lineup for at least three-fourths of the season will help and we are all excited to see how Justin Faulk improves in his sophomore campaign but that alone isn't enough to fix a defense that was in as bad of shape as the Hurricanes were last season. With Bryan Allen now in Anaheim, that leaves Tim Gleason alone to take on most of the tough assignments and someone is going to have to step into that role alongside him AND take on more penalty killing duties along with it. Can one of Corvo, Harrison, Faulk or McBain do that? Corvo is somewhat underrated defensively and played this kind of role in the past, but who knows if he can do it now? He's 35 and was a healthy scratch for the Bruins during March of last season. Both Harrison and Faulk played in the top-four last season but didn't carry the defensive workload that Gleason did. Harrison appears to be the more likely candidate to move into that role since Faulk will probably be trusted to supply more offense alongside Pitkanen. McBain had some success playing with Gleason last season but that came with a very small sample size and he is still a third pairing defenseman right now. In other words, there is a major hole on the defense and someone is going to need to over-acheive for it to be filled.

In addition to that, the Hurricanes are without a top-level defenseman right now and that kind of hurts them. Pitkanen and Gleason are great players, but I don't think anyone would call them elite and Faulk still has some work to do before he's in the conversation, too. The Blues, Kings, Red Wings, Bruins, Senators, Predators and many other teams know the benefits of having an elite defenseman at their arsenal because they can pair almost anyone with them and have somewhat of an effective pairing. It's also great to have a reliable, top-end player to eat up around 25 minutes a game and take pressure off the rest of your defense corps. The Hurricanes don't have that luxury right now, unfortunately.

Among those who pay attention to advanced statistics in the NHL, the general rule of thumb is that the better a team is at controlling possession, the more likely they are to have success in the future. Teams like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Jose and, most recently, Los Angeles have backed up this theory as they are perennial playoff teams and are consistently some of the best clubs in the NHL at controlling possession. We know that teams who control possession are more likely to be successful in a given year, but something that isn't discussed is the sustainability of a high possession rate over the course of multiple seasons.

Let's say that you are writing a season preview for a team that you don't know much about. One way to get an idea of how they will perform is to look at their Corsi or Fenwick percentage from the previous season and see how good they were beyond wins and losses. If a team has a Fenwick that is above 50% then some people will jump to the conclusion that this team should be in good shape for the next year because of their ability to drive play and control possession as a team. It isn't a baseless assumption but there are some problems that arise if you jump to this conclusion. Just because a team was able to control possession at a high rate one year, doesn't mean it will carry over to the next season. Sure, it might if the team in question has all of their key pieces returning but even then, it doesn't always happen. Just ask the Tampa Bay Lightning, who saw their Fenwick Close percentage fall from 53.68% in 2010-11 to 48.31% last year.

Better yet, just ask the Carolina Hurricanes, who saw their Fenwick Close percentage take the biggest drop in the last five years after the 2008-09 season.

The 2008-09 season is one that a lot of Hurricanes fans remember very well. It was the year where the Hurricanes went 10-1-2 in the month of March and ended up making the playoffs as the 6th seed. It was the year that the Hurricanes pulled off a string of miraculous finishes to defeat the New Jersey Devils and the top-seeded Boston Bruins in seven games in the first two rounds of the playoffs. More importantly, it was the year where the Hurricanes pulled off one of their most impressive runs in franchise history and while things ended on a sour note, this year usually resonates well with Carolina fans. Even after they were swept by the Penguins in the Eastern Conference Finals, there was still a sense of optimism among the fan-base once the year was over.

The Hurricanes were ranked 6th in the NHL in Fenwick close, had a good looking roster featuring talents such as Eric Staal, Tuomo Ruutu and Joni Pitkanen who were in the prime of their careers, proven veterans in Ray Whitney, Matt Cullen and Sergei Samsonov and some decent young talents in Brandon Sutter, Anton Babchuk and Zach Boychuk who were planning to step into bigger roles the next season. There was plenty of reasons to stay optimistic in Carolina because it looked like this team was going to be in decent shape for at least the next season...until this happened.

Fenwick Close Percentage at Even Strength

Over the course of one year, the Hurricanes saw their Fenwick percentage drop by nearly six points and they found themselves at the bottom of the NHL standings throughout most of the first half of the season. This is the biggest drop that any team has seen in one year and it does raise some questions about how sustainable a team's Fenwick or Corsi percentage is over multiple seasons. Of course, the first thing that comes to my mind when I look at Carolina's fall from grace is that it could be somewhat of an anomaly. How often has a team seen their Fenwick close rate drop by that much in such a short span of time? I mentioned earlier that the same thing happened to the Lightning last year but other than that, how often has a decline like this occurred?

Carolina has suffered the most extreme fall but this has happened to quite a few others teams since 2007:

In the case of the few teams (San Jose, Chicago, Detroit), being 3-5 percent worse at controlling possession than they were the previous year didn't mean a whole lot because they were already top teams in the league in Fenwick percentage. However, for teams like Toronto, Columbus, Nashville, Colorado, Calgary and Montreal, it made a much bigger impact because being a few percentages worse than they were the year before was the difference between being average to above average territorially and being a bad team. The one exception here being the Minnesota Wild who went from bad to just plain awful.

Carolina, Tampa Bay and the Islanders are in a class of their own here, though because their Fenwick percentage dropped much more than the rest of the teams here. Carolina went from having the sixth highest Fenwick close rate in the NHL in 2008-09 to being in the bottom-ten the next season. The Lightning had the third best Fenwick close percentage in the NHL in 2010-11 only to plummet to 19th the next season and the Islanders well...they went from being mediocre to horrible which is similar to what happened to the Wild in 2010-11. 

Were all of these declines completely random and out of the blue or are there some logical explanations behind them? I mentioned that a team's possession rates are likely to stay put if the majority of their team stays intact so a major roster turnover or a loss of a key player can have a direct effect on how well a team can control possession. For instance, Tampa Bay lost Sean Bergenheim to free agency before the 2011-12 season and while Bergenheim isn't a star, he is a terrific player at swimming upstream and controlling possession. He's one of the best in the league at doing this too, so losing him definitely affected the Lightning's ability to drive the play forward, especially since most of their top scorers aren't exactly aces when it comes to driving the play forward. Did Carolina have any similar losses after the 2008-09 season? Let's take a look. 

The Hurricanes roster didn't suffer many ground-breaking changes but there were more than a few moves made. Dennis Seidenberg was traded, Anton Babchuk left for the KHL and both Patrick Eaves and Ryan Bayda departed via free agency. Three out of these four players were doing a pretty good job at pushing the play forward but they weren't anywhere close to being the best on the team in this category, so their contributions should have been replaced without that much of a problem. The Canes went the free agency route to fill these holes by signing Tom Kostopoulos, Aaron Ward, Andrew Alberts, Jay Harrison and Stephane Yelle.

What they got out of these players wasn't terrible but it's hard to argue that they weren't downgrades compared to what they lost the previous year. With that being said, the Hurricanes still didn't lose that much overall. Eaves and Bayda were bottom-six depth forwards, so Kostopoulos and Yelle being "downgrades" there was not that big of a deal. Anton Babchuk is a powerplay quarterback and a defenseman who could only be trusted in heavily sheltered minutes and while his goal production was missed, the minutes he played aren't difficult to replace. Unfortunately, the Hurricanes didn't have the best luck here and cycled through a number of different players such as Bryan Rodney, Jay Harrison, Alex Picard, Brett Carson and Jamie McBain in the "sheltered, offensive defenseman" role. Still, players like Babchuk are not that hard to find and losing him was not that big of a blow.

The loss of Seidenberg, however, was much more difficult to replace because he was a top-four defender for the Hurricanes and played on both special teams units. He wasn't blowing away his competition and he wasn't even close to being the best defenseman on the team that year, but he left some pretty big shoes to fill after the Hurricanes traded him. Now, if you compare Alberts' numbers to Seidenberg's you might say that the Canes didn't see that much of a drop off with him but the numbers here are misleading because Alberts wasn't taking over Seidenberg's role. Alberts played much fewer minutes than Seidenberg, was used against significantly weaker opponents and was primarly a 3rd pairing/penalty kill specialist. Although, with Gleason, Corvo, Pitkanen and Wallin on the roster at the time, you would have to think that one of them could take over Seidenberg's role without too much of an issue.

In theory, this sounded like a good idea at the time and it shoudn't have dragged down the Hurricanes that much but it didn't take long for things to get ugly that season. Corvo spent a lot of the year injured and played in only 34 games before being traded to the Washington Capitals at the deadline, Gleason missed 21 games with various injuries and Pitkanen was forced to take on an enormous workload due to the lack of talent on the blue-line (he averaged 27 minutes a game) and looked a bit over his head despite setting a career high in points. At the end of the season, their time on ice leaders included names like Brian Pothier, Brett Carson and Aaron Ward. When you account for that, you can definitely say that injuries combined with the loss of Seidenberg played a role in the Hurricanes going into free fall mode in 2009 but that was just part of the problem. A bigger issue was that their top players from the previous year were vastly under-performing.

There might be some who want to blame the Hurricanes misfortunes on the injuries to Tuomo Ruutu, Erik Cole and Chad LaRose and while those certainly didn't help matters, you would be foolish to think that injures were the only thing keeping this team down. In the end, it all comes back to your top players not performing up to standard and that was the case with just about everyone on the Hurricanes that year. Staal, Whitney, Samsonov, Jokinen, Pitkanen, Sutter and many others went from being very good possession players one year to guys who could barely push the play forward the next, which pretty much describes the Hurricanes team numbers, as well.

My theory is that there is always an explanation for everything, so I don't believe that a team that was so good at controlling play at even strength one year could take such a dramatic turn in the opposite direction for no reason at all, especially in the span of only one season. What exactly was the reason for so many players on the Hurricanes sharp decline, though? I touched on Pitkanen and how he was forced to take on a bigger role earlier, but what about Eric Staal? Is it possible that his 2008-09 season was an aberration and that his true talent is closer to what we've seen the last couple of years? When looking at his recent track record, that could be true. As for Ray Whitney, it's possible that his age may have been catching up to him even though his boxcar numbers indicated otherwise. Erik Cole's ghastly numbers may have been the result of him being used in a tough-minutes role that he wasn't suited for and I'm not sure what to say about most of the other names on this list.

This Carolina squad in particular may just be a freak case but remember, they aren't the only team to see their performance fall off a cliff almost inexplicably so it's not like every team is immune to this kind of downfall. If there is one thing that the Hurricanes have shown here, it is that once you see your performance take this kind of dive, it takes a long time to get it back to where it was. The Hurricanes are entering their fourth year since this happened and are still below-average in territorial play. Will the additions of Jordan Staal and Alexander Semin change that? We shall see.

Last week, I used Greg Sinclair's Super Shot Search application to determine how many scoring chances each player on the Hurricanes contributed individually and whether or not it related to the amount of goals they scored. The study revealed some interesting information about a few players but ultimately didn't prove much since we were only looking at one year's worth of data. With only one year's worth of data tracked, it was unknown whether or not the ability to create scoring chances was a skill or just random variation that could bounce around every year. There is only one way to find this out; collect as many seasons worth of data as you can and see if there are any noticeable patterns, which is what I did with the Hurricanes using the Super Shot Search app. 

This app only goes back four seasons, which is still a small sample size overall but it should be big enough to notice some patterns with certain players scoring chances rates and how much it affected their goal total. I basically followed the same procedure from my article last week where I looked at how many scoring chances a player recorded in a year, broke it down by game, by ice-time and noted what percentage of the shots they recorded were scoring chances. Only instead of doing it for just one season, I used this process for every Carolina player in the last four years. I also included recent seasons for former Carolina players so I now have four years worth of data for everyone involved with the Hurricanes during that time period.

If you have talked to anyone who has dabbled with in-depth hockey stats before, they will probably tell you that shots are the most debated and controversial topic among statisticans and regular bloggers. Most hockey statisticians use simple shots for/against to judge how effective certain players and teams are at controlling the pace of play, which usually translates to a team winning more often than not. Despite numerous evidence showing that controlling the shot battle usually leads to more victories, there have been detractors to this theory. The usual argument against shots being a predictor of success is that there are some teams who are better at controlling "shots of higher quality" than others. In theory, this makes a lot of sense because shot that comes from close in the slot has a better chance of being a goal than a harmless looking wrister from a weak angle. Thus, the scoring chance project was launched last season where numerous bloggers tracked scoring chances for their favorite teams, myself included. This process has been explained numerous times but if you want a refresher of how we tracked chances, go here.

There have been at least 18 individual team seasons tracked over the last few years and Eric T. of Broad Street Hockey and NHL Numbers discovered a couple months ago that the difference between shot differential and scoring chance differential is minimal. Tracking scoring chances showed us nothing that simple shot data couldn't, so the claim has been made that tracking scoring chances is unnecessary and not more of a predictor of future success. On a team level, I agree but I am still believe that scoring chances have some value, but on an individual level rather than a team level. 

Using scoring chance differential doesn't prove to be anymore useful than using shot data, but most fans will tell you that a certain player is better at creating scoring chances than another. These opinions are likely subjective and don't mean much at face value but I've always felt the same way. Whenever I watch a game, I notice that there are some players who are better at getting shots off from dangerous scoring areas and those players could have more value than others. The problems with this belief is not knowing how much of a difference there is between a scoring chance and a regular shot on goal in the long run. You also have to wonder if the number of scoring chances a player records in a year is sustainable over the course of multiple seasons or not. 

To see how much of a difference shot location makes for an individual player (if any at all), we can look at where each player shot the puck in a given season and see how many of his shots came from within a dangerous scoring area. This could show us how effective a certain player is at creating offense or how more likely he is to score than a player who is less effective at getting into scoring areas. With help from Greg Sinclair's Super Shot Search web site, I looked at every shot each Carolina player last season and determined whether or not it was a scoring chance. After that, I used this data to see how effective each player was at creating scoring chances.

A closer look at the data is coming after the jump.

Much of the discussion of the Hurricanes this off-season has been concerning their revamped top-six and the issues they have on defense. While there is no doubt that these are very important areas of discussion for next season, something that might be getting overlooked is the team's third line and how different it will look next season. I have talked about this before, but substituting Jordan Staal for Brandon Sutter allows the Hurricanes to change the dynamics of their forward corps and we could see the third line used in a completely different way than before. For the last couple of years, the Canes third line has been your prototypical checking line that was used in a heavy defensive role. Carolina having terrific defensive forwards like Sutter, Patrick Dwyer and Andreas Nodl allowed them to have a unit that they could use in such situations.

With Sutter gone, some might think that the Canes need a defensive center to fill that void but that isn't necessarily true since both Staal brothers are capable of playing against the toughs and they have enough players in their system capable of centering the third line right now. With the top two lines likely handling most of the tougher assignments, the bottom-six could be able to play a more offensive role than they have in the past. I've mentioned the possibility of the Hurricanes running this type of system a few times before and that is mainly because they have a good personnel to do so.

Think about it, one of the team's biggest problems last year was not having enough forwards who were of top-six quality and that they had to use players who would be third liners on most teams on the top two lines. Scoring was hard to come by last season and one reason for that was because their top-six regularly consisted of players like Chad LaRose, Jiri Tlusty, Drayson Bowman and and Jerome Samson. None of whom are bad players but they aren't exactly ideal top-six options. Despite that, they all did a fine job playing in the roles they were assigned last season and could have a lot of success in an offensive third-line role. One player in particular who may have a lot of success in this role is Chad LaRose. 

The versatility of the Hurricanes top-six is something that I have often praised on this blog and many other places. Having a few players who can effectively play both center and wing and all but one player slated to be in the Hurricanes top-six next season can do that, the one exception being Alexander Semin. How the team will roll their lines next season is anyone's guess at this point, but there have been a lot of predictions saying that Eric Staal will be the one moving over to the wing on the first line with his brother, Jordan, playing center.

Eric has experience playing on the wing but he still hasn't played there for a substantial amount of time aside from the Olympics. Making the assumption that he will be able to play there full-time without issue is a bit premature and it's also overlooking a player who has more experience playing on th wing, that player being Jussi Jokinen. Jokinen played center full-time last year and was very successful at it, but let's remember that he played left wing in the two previous years and was very successful in that role. He also had his best offensive seasons in the years he was playing on the wing so it seems like if anyone is going to be moving over, it will be Jokinen.

There are reasons to keep him at center, though. Jokinen was the team's best face-off guy last season and his popular line with Jeff Skinner and Tuomo Ruutu was the team's best unit in terms of controlling scoring chances at even strength. It might be wise for the Hurricanes to keep that line intact given their success, but the additions of Jordan Staal and Alex Semin sort of changes that. The Hurricanes have more offensive weapons to use now, so might be able to spread out their lines a little more evenly than they have for the last couple years. 

Ultimately, the Hurricanes are going to do what optimizes Jokinen's skills the best and what helps the team the most, so does that mean keeping him at center or moving over to the first line? After the jump, we will look at Jokinen's history at both positions and determine what suits him best.