It isn’t about whether he’ll be healthy or not – it’s about probability. Sometimes pucks just go in for players and Bourque had one of those seasons. Inevitably, guys like that come back down to their “natural” shooting percentage: they “regress to the mean”. It’s what happened to Jordan Staal after his lights out rookie campaign.

…bust on me all the time when I bring up Bourque. They think it’s hilarious that I would consider him a Top 6 for the Flames.

I mean to say “unfortunately…when dealing with an injury especially when it happens right when a player is hitting a stride athletically, there is no knowing if he gets back into any type of zone.”

The thing is, KJ, that the zone is not a place that players reside indefinitely. Everything we’ve looked at recently when it comes to this stuff indicates that, for lack of a better phrase – what goes up, must come down.

For example, I talk about “the percentages” a lot around here. That refers to the SV% when a player is on the ice and the SH%. Tyler’s look at the percentages indicates that the league wide mean for the two combined (often called a “PDO” number) hovers around 100 and that teams (and players) significantly above or below the mean eventually, over time, regress back to it.

Bourque had the highest even strength PDO on the team last year by a fair margin (it was 102 and change I think). He was the only Flame with a better than 10% shooting percentage when he was on the ice and he was also gifted a fairly above average SV% as well. It’s a fairly good bet, therefore, that he won’t be operating at the same level next year.

To look at it another way – Bourque had a career SH% of about 9% prior to last year, and that was over about 183 games. In 58 last year, he was humming along at 14.1% – a more than 5% jump over his normal rate. Unless he got a bionic arm or changed his game drastically over what he was doing before, that’s probably just a nice that was bound to end at some point.

None of this invalidates what Bourque does well. He’s still, in fact, a valuable contributor to the team because he’s fast, big, mean and smart. We probably just can’t bank on him being one of the best ES producers in the league again next year is all.

The Flames were middling in shot prevention last year. Not good, but they’re weren’t terrible – FLA was much worse, for example, but they allowed less goals because Vokoun and Anderson were outstanding.

While Kipper certainly wasn’t all to blame, he wasn’t exactly part of the solution either.