Something you may have noticed is that I haven't posted any updates on Carolina's NCAA prospects in a couple weeks. The reason for this is because there are usually only two games per weekend in the college rankings and with only five players to track, there isn't much to say about them unless they had a big performance. This is especially true if you don't have a chance to watch any of their games, which has been the case for me and the Hurricanes NCAA prospects this year. That is, until last night when I tuned into NBC Sports to watch the Wisconsin/Denver game featuring Carolina's 2012 fifth round draft pick Brendan Woods. 

Woods isn't one of the team's highly regarded prospects and he is only a borderline top-six player on a struggling Wisconsin Badgers squad, but getting a closer look at him to dissect the pros and cons of his playing style is never a bad thing. Watching this game also gives us a chance to look at some other team's prospects as there were many NHL draft picks playing in this game and keep an eye on some players who might be entering the draft this summer. This also gives me a chance to finally do some statistical tracking with college hockey, which is something that's been on my to-do list for awhile. Better late than never, I suppose. 

After the jump, I will breakdown the Denver/Wisconsin game a little bit and point out some things in Woods' performance that stood out to me.

In case you haven't heard, the Charlotte Checkers have one the best offenses in the American Hockey League. Even after being shutout by the Texas Stars last night, they still have scored more goals than any other team in the league and have been held to three or fewer goals in only five games this season. They are also the only team in the AHL to currently have at least five players with five or more goals, so the scoring has been relatively spread out amongst the forward corps. The NHL and the Hurricanes might be MIA for the time being, but the Checkers are at least doing their job of keeping hockey interesting in the Carolinas.

The start the Checkers are off to has gotten a lot of fans excited about some of the Canes younger prospects, namely Zach Boychuk who has been a point-per-game player for most of the year, but Charlotte isn't the only team in the league with a high-powered offense. The NHL's absence has led to there being a massive talent increase across the entire AHL and many teams are enjoying hot starts thanks to that. Among those teams are the Abbotsford Heat, Springfield Falcons, Oklahoma City Barons, Grand Rapids Griffins and many more.

I've gone over my concerns about the success of the Checkers offense not being sustainable in the long-run because of inflated shooting percentages, but what's to say that they are the only team going through this? For all we know, there are just as many players on Abbotsford, Oklahoma City and Springfield with high shooting percentages that can't be expected to stay where they currently are. Seeing how the Checkers compare to them in that aspect should give us a good idea of how good this team really is.

In addition to that, it would also be nice to know how the Checkers compare to the rest of the AHL in terms of how much of their production is coming from players who have a chance to make the NHL relatively soon. There might be a lot of NHL talent in the AHL right now but there are still quite a number of players who will likely spend the majority of their careers in the minors and gaudy numbers from those players ultimately do not mean much for an organization's prospect pool and future. Seeing how the Checkers rank in this department will give us a better idea of how much their success means to the Hurricanes organization.

After the jump, we will take a look at where the Checkers stand in both areas.

It's the middle of November and there has still yet to be an NHL game played this season. All fans have to be beyond frustrated right now but I think the Hurricanes fanbase might be among the most pissed off right now. This was looking like a season with a ton of promise for this team. They had one of their most eventful off-seasons in recent memory by acquiring Jordan Staal and Alex Semin and on top of that, their division is pretty much up for grabs right now. There was so much excitement and anticipation heading into this year regarding this team and now it is all put on hold until the owners and Player's Association come to terms with a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Until that time, there isn't anything fans can do except wait and wonder about what could have been.

There are still a lot of things that are left up in the air with the Hurricanes this season, though. Most are wondering how the acquisition of Alexander Semin will turn out, but I think adding Jordan Staal to the mix is a little more intriguing, mostly because there is a lot about Staal that is uncertain. One thing we do know about him is that he was fantastic as a shutdown center for the Pittsburgh Penguins for the last six years and still has a lot of upside remaining. There are a lot who say that Staal can emerge as a huge scoring threat if he is given the right linemates and ice-time, which isn't too crazy to say if you look at his body of work in Pittsburgh and consider that he is only 24 years old, but one thing to remember is that Staal wasn't always confined to the third-line center role with the Penguins.

If you go back to the latter-half of the 2010-11 season, you may recall that both Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin missed significant time with injuries, leaving Staal as the team's #1 center during that stretch. There was also a brief time period last year where Staal was placed into this role as the Pens normal top-two centers were out with injuries. How did he perform during these stretches? Well, he had 23 points in 31 games from February to the end of the 2010-12 season and 4 points in the 5 games in October where Malkin was hurt. His numbers are decent enough but once agian, points don't tell us the entire story, especially with a player like Staal.

To get a better idea of Staal's performance, along with just about every other player, you need to take a closer look at their contributions on the ice, which is why I am currently doing a very ambitious project where I am tracking scoring chances, zone entries, zone exits and many other on-ice events for as many games as I can. You may remember that I did scoring chances for the Hurricanes last year, and while those are helpful, they still only tell you part of the story, which is why I will be expanding my studies this season (whenever it starts) and am currently tracking the previous year in my down time.

I am currently at the part of last season where Staal assumed the top-line center role for the Penguins, so after the jump we are going to take a closer look at his performance during the Penguins game against the Montreal Canadiens on October 20, 2011. The analysis starts after the jump.

The junior hockey season has been an odd one so far, or at least it has for a lot of the teams currently housing Carolina Hurricanes prospects. Take Ryan Murphy's Kitchener Rangers for instance, they were struggling a fair bit at the start of the year but have straited to turn things in the right direction over the past few weeks. They won all three of their games in the last week and are 8-1-1-0 in their last 10 games. Murphy hasn't been the main catalyst for this turnaround but he has been improving a lot after a rough month of October and had another multi-point performance this weekend. The news of both Murphy and the Rangers turning things around is good news for the Canes organization as a whole.

On the other hand, some teams that were flying high early in the year are now going through a rough patch with the current prime suspects being Daniel Altshuller's Oshawa Generals. The Generals were one of the most exciting teams in the OHL during the beginning stages of the year and were mostly backed by a high-powered offense and one of the OHL's leading offensive threats in Boone Jenner. At the time, Altshuller wasn't providing the Generals with remarkable goaltending, but he was performing well enough to prevent them from losing games and maintain their spot at the top of the East Division. Over the last 10 games or so, things have gotten tougher for the Generals as they have won only three games in that stretch and are hanging on by a thread to the top spot of their conference. Their offense appears to have run into a bit of a bad stretch and Altshuller just hasn't performed well enough to steal games for them, which is something he may need to do eventually.

Brock McGinn's Guelph Storm could also fit into this category but they haven't struggled as much and are still in the mix in the Midwest Division. They certainly helped their cause this week by getting a shutout over the first place team, Owen Sound, but that was undone after they dropped their next two games to Sarnia and Brampton respectively. It's still along season ahead for everyone and we've already seen how much can change over the course of a month, so it will be interesting to see how the standings look come mid-December. Some good news is that all but one of the OHL teams with Carolina prospects are in the top-half of their conference so most of the team's we're following have had a decent first 20 games or so.

After the jump, we will look at the performance of Carolina's CHL prospects in more detail.

If you haven't been keeping up with NHL Numbers over the past week, then you missed a fantastic post from Benjamin Wendorf where he examined which players in the NHL could be labelled as "puck hogs." A puck hog being a player who takes an unproportionally high amount of shots compared to his linemates. Whether or not a player being a "puck hog" is a good or a bad thing is up to you. On one hand, a player that is shooting the puck more often than his teammates is creating more scoring opportunities for himself and the team but on the flip-side, he could be aimlessly shooting from everywhere instead of waiting for a better opportunity to score. These kinds of players are usually labelled as "selfish" and whatnot by the media.

To find out which players are "puck hogs," Wendorf looked at the total number of shots on goal and missed shots every player in the NHL was on-ice for and how many of those shots came from each player. He explains it in more detail in the article, but the main idea is that a player who takes a high percentage of shots he is on-ice for is a "puck hog" by this definition. Wendorf also lists the top and bottom-25 "puck hogs" in the NHL from 2007 through 2012 and you may notice that there are no Carolina Hurricanes players on either list, at least during those years.

This leaves the door open for a lot of questions about the Hurricanes and whether or not they have housed any "puck hogs" over the last five seasons. Carolina fans have always voiced their opinions about players such as Joni Pitkanen not shoot as often as they would like, while others such as Chad LaRose tend to shoot from everywhere instead of waiting for a better scoring opportunity. Do these perceptions match up with reality, though? To find out, I applied the same method as Wendorf to every Carolina Hurricanes player from 2008 to 2012 to see who was hogging the puck the most during those seasons.

Change is something that a lot of sports fans are always uncomfortable with at first because no one really knows what will happen after the said change occurs. This is why the reactions to the Jordan Staal trade involving Brandon Sutter & Brian Dumoulin were very mixed among Carolina fans when it happened. Obviously getting J. Staal is a huge boost to Carolina's forward corps, but many Hurricanes fans were not sure of what kind of player he would be and whether or not he fit the team's system. He could end up being a perfect fit, develop chemistry with his linemates and be as good as advertised or he could not work out at all. He has still yet to play one game with the Hurricanes so we don't know how good he will be.

With Brandon Sutter, on the other hand, most Carolina fans knew what we had in him, which was a solid checking line center with decent two-way upside. He was a perfect fit for the team's third line and most fans were comfortable with him centering that unit. Now that he is in Pittsburgh, no one is really sure of who will center the third line now and take over Sutter's role. Not many are sure where J. Staal fits on the team now either and thus, there are a lot of unanswered questions with the Hurricanes this year. While some may be excited about the new-look Hurricanes, there just as many who are skeptical because there is a lot that is up in the air right now. 

The immediate future may look a bit dubious right now in terms of what the team's forward corps will look like, but one thing to remember about this trade is that Jordan Staal is a better overall player than Sutter. We may not know where Staal is going to play, but he makes this team's top-six stronger than it was over the last couple of years and that should immediately have fans excited. The Hurricanes can always find another checking center but they won't find another player like Jordan Staal for awhile, which is why the trade was made. There are still questions regarding who will take over the third line center role and even more uncertainty concerning who will take over Sutter's defensive responsibility but still, replacing him shouldn't be too hard if you look in the past and see who the Hurricanes used in these roles during prior seasons.

Sutter had only been with the team for four seasons and he spent three of them as the team's "shutdown center," so the team has been able to get by without him before. Looking into the past often provides answers for the future, so what we're going to do after the jump is look at Carolina's tough-minute forwards over the last five seasons, see how effective they were and discuss whether or not they can use a similar strategy this year.

The Charlotte Checkers kick off their first home series of the year today when they take on the Chicago Wolves in the first of a two-game set. The Wolves (6-0-1-0)are currently ranked first in the Midwest Division with 13 points and are tied for 2nd in the Western Conference. While these two teams have similar records, the Checkers have a much larger goal differential with a +13 compared to the +2 the Wolves have right now. The Checkers goal differential is inflated thanks to their weekend sweep against the Peoria Rivermen a week ago when they outscored them 10-0. Charlotte has made a habit out of getting into a lot of high scoring games this year, so they have a few blowouts on their record right now that definitely help out their goal-differential. Regardless, the Wolves are going to be their toughest test of the season thus far.

Wolves Stats from the AHL's web site

Carolina fans may notice a familiar face on the Wolves roster in Derek Joslin but the Wolves sport a few other names you may recognize. The most notable one is Zack Kassian, who was formerly a first round pick of the Buffalo Sabres before being sent to the Vancouver Canucks in a trade involving Cody Hodgson last year. Kassian is off to a pretty good start for the Wolves with 7 points in 9 games, which is pretty good for a 21-year-old with essentially only one year of professional hockey experience under his belt. He is also scoring on over 20% of the shots he has taken so far, so luck has played a slight role in his year so far.

A few other former/future NHL-ers on the Wolves roster are Andrew Gordon, Chris Tanev, Andrew Ebbett and Brett Sterling. All of these players are fringe guys for the most part, aside from Tanev who has spent a decent amount of time with the Vancouver Canucks over the last couple of seasons. The Wolves don't appear to have anyone that is performing at a superb rate offensively like the Checkers do right now, but that hasn't been much of a problem for them as they have won six of their nine games this year. The Wolves also appear to have their scoring more balanced throughout the lineup, whereas Drayson Bowman and Zach Boychuk have accounted for over 36% of the Checkers goals. 

Other players worth keeping an eye on in Chicago's lineup are defenseman Kevin Cannauton, who has the highest shot rate on the team with 2.89 shots per game. He was Vancouver's third round pick in 2009 and while he hasn't produced many points, he has definitely been giving the Wolves a decent amount of offense with the number of shots he has created. Bill Sweatt, Nathan Longpre and Andrew Gordon are also players who are creating a decent amount of shots and are worth taking note of if you're a Checkers fan. However, it's worth mentioning that the 2.89 shots per game Cannauton is producing is the same rate Drayson Bowman has this year, and he is ranked only third on the Checkers.

As for the goaltending matchup, Eddie Lack has gotten most of the starts for the Wolves this season and he has a save percentage of .910. It's likely that we are going to see him in both games since there is a two-day break in the series but it's possible that former Bemidji State Beaver Matt Climie could get the start in one of these games, as well. The Checkers, meanwhile, usually rotate starting goalies but we could see Dan Ellis play on a more regular basis soon as he has outperformed Justin Peters this year.

The Checkers have scored more than the Wolves this year and have created more shots per game (32.2 vs. 27.4), so this looks like a series the Checkers should be favored in, but the Wolves have found ways to win this year despite not putting up flashy numbers. Like I said earlier, this is going to be the Checkers toughest test of the young season and it wouldn't surprise me if both games are very close.

Since most leagues have at least a month of regular season play done by now, I thought a good idea would be to look at how some of the Hurricanes players and prospects are performing in their respective leagues thus far. I've been posting weekly updates on the team's NCAA and junior prospects but some of the team's roster players such as Jiri Tlusty, Jussi Jokinen and Alexander Semin are playing hockey in professional leagues overseas and their performance is certainly worth tracking, as well. Since these players are all in different leagues for the most part, what I'm going to do is compare their performance using Gabe Desjardins' NHL equivalency translations to show what their performance would equate to if they were all playing in the NHL.

If you need a refresher, a translation factor is a number that shows the "difficulty" of each league in terms of how much easier or difficult it is to score at a certain level. Every player is expected to maintain a certain part of their scoring when they jump from one league to another, which is what the translation factor takes into account. For instance, a player jumping from the AHL would be expected to keep about 44% of their scoring if they played the entire year in the NHL instead. It may sound like a crude and simple method, but it really does a good job of showing the difficulty level of each league. This tool is even more helpful now because there are so many NHL-ers playing in different leagues during the lockout.

This is neccessary because league has a certain degree of difficulty and not all scoring lines are create equal across different leagues. It might be easy to get excited about a player from your favorite team dominating in a league overseas, but it may not be that impressive when you consider the talent level and difficulty of that league. Being a point-per-game player in the KHL is much more impressive than having the same scoring rate in the less-talented Swiss National League, for example. Therefore, it's important to take into account the difficulty of the league a certain player is in and how he would be performing if everyone was on the same playing field. Things could be a little different this season since the lockout has caused a massive talent increase in just about every league, but the talent level difference between each league is mostly the same when you look at which players are in each league. The KHL is still the best hockey league outside North America, followed by the Swedish Elite League, Czech Elite League and so on and so forth.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the performance of the Hurricanes players so far.

Over the last month or so, I have been posting my goal and point total projections for the Carolina Hurricanes players in the upcoming season and while these numbers may not mean much now with the lockout cutting into the year, I still believe that we will have a shortened NHL season and there is never any harm in making predictions. If you haven't been following the series, here is a refresher on how I have been making my projections;

A player's shot rate, shooting percentage and ice-time will have a direct impact on the number of goals he scores, while his teammate's shooting percentage, the number of shots they produce along with his ice-time will affect how many assists he has. Knowing that, I looked at each player's shot rate, shooting percentage, ice-time at even strength & special teams along with his teammate's shot rates and shooting percentage when "x player" was on the ice. I also looked at how many assists a player records at even strength & special teams relative to how many goals he was on-ice for at even strength & special teams to get an idea of how active offensively he typically is. I repeated this process for every player on the Hurricanes* and examined their numbers over the last five years to see if there were any patterns that I could point out concerning their shot rate, shooting percentage or anything else.

This process help me get an idea of what to expect from each player in a given year and make my projections as realistic as possible. There were some areas where I had to make an educated guess (the toughest was figuring out how many shots a player would be on-ice for and how well his teammates would shoot), but you have to do that in some areas since shooting percentage is unpredictable in general. Like I said earlier, the 82-game projections probably do not mean much at the moment, but you can always break it down by scoring rate to get a better idea of what to expect in a shortened season.

After the jump, I will give an overview of my projections along with an explanation for some of my predictions.

*Projections were not made for fringe layers such as Zac Dalpe, Zach Boychuk, Drayson Bowman, etc. due to lack of NHL experience.

One of the top priorities for Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford this summer was to acquire a "veteran defenseman." When he said that, I thought he was going to try to sign someone like Greg Zanon, Carlo Colaiacovo, Scott Hannan or Michal Rozsival to replace the departing Bryan Allen. The Canes needed someone who could play top-four minutes and kill penalties to fillt he void that Allen left and there were more than a few defensemen out there who fit the bill. The veteran defenseman who Rutherford eventually signed, however, was way off my radar. That player being the now three-time Carolina Hurricane, Joe Corvo.

The reason why Corvo was so far off my radar, other than the fact that he's been traded from Carolina twice in the last four years, is because he is more known for his offense and his play in Boston last season suggested that he is barely a top-four defenseman now. He started off playing some big minutes in Boston but was soon regulated to a third pairing/powerplay specialist role and even found himself in the press box for a handful of games later in the year. Corvo is also 35 years old, so he may not have much left in the tank at this point. It just seemed a bit odd that Rutherford would sign him over some of the other candidates out there.

Perhaps Rutherford decided it would be better to go with the devil he knows rather than someone like Zanon, Hanan or Rozsival since they are also past 30 years of age and the Hurricanes are far less familiar with those players than they are with Corvo. It's worth noting that Corvo has played very well in the past with the Hurricanes. Was he the ideal defenseman? No, but he has been able to be a competent top-four defenseman during his history with the Hurricanes. The last time he was here, he was essentially being used in an all-around role and put up some decent boxcar and underlying numbers to boot.

A lot can change in two years, though as Corvo's play seemed to diminish quite a bit with the Bruins last year. This could be due to him not fitting the Bruins' system or his age catching up to him. Whatever the reason, the Bruins coaching staff didn't have much confidence in Corvo last year, as they used him in an extremely sheltered role and he could go back to having to play tough minutes with the Canes if no one else can fill into Bryan Allen's spot. I am not sure how the team plans to use him next year or even if he fits Kirk Muller's system, but one thing we do know is that Corvo can be counted on to be effective on the powerplay and produce a decent amount offensively. How much will he produce for the Hurricanes in this coming season. We will look into that after the jump.