Mark Giordano Scoring Chance WOWY

For those of you who don't know, WOWY stands for "with or without you"-basically, it's a way of measuring how each player impacts another on the ice.

The popular opinion around the Saddlesphere is that Mark Giordano's been struggling mightily in the first quarter of the season, and the two prevailing narratives thus far are a) that Scott Hannan isn't an adequate defensive partner and b) he's been saddled with sub-par forward performances by the likes of Jarome Iginla and Alex Tanguay.

For this exercise, I'm using scoring chances calculated by Kent Wilson over at FlamesNation. I only used scoring chances that occurred at even strength while tied to compensate for score effects and PP/PK bumps.

A quick note: the scoring chances for game 3 are not included due to a bug in the scoring chance app that day, although there were only 3 ES tied chances (2 for MTL, 1 for CGY) so it likely would not have made much of an impact. Last night's aren't in there either, because I did the tables Thursday and I am lazy.

First, let's take a look at how Mark Giordano and Scott Hannan compare.

The percentages, if you want them: .302, .400, .777.

Now, the latter two columns are admittedly a small sample size since these two are joined at the hip but there's a pretty big difference from a .66/1 scoring chance differential to a 3.5/1 scoring chance differential. The massive hole they've dug for themselves as a pairing is notable, especially since their CorsiRelQCOMP is right in the middle of the pack among players with at least 10GP-Hannan is 8th, Giordano 9th overall; in the defence corps they are 3rd and 4th.

With the small sample size I'm hesitant to make a declaration about this graph, but I will say being way from Giordano hasn't hurt Hannan at all.

Next, Giordano and Iginla.

Again, the percentages: .444, .429, .488.

Ah, yes. This is the meaty one. Giordano's spent a lot of time at EV with Jarome Iginla this year. I think that it's safe to say that with the amount of shifts they take together, Iginla's the "worst" forward he's had regular time with.

But, the numbers don't lie: Iginla gets better at EVT when he's away from Giordano, and Giordano gets worse at EVT when he's away from Iginla. Obviously, none of those results are "good" though.

Is Giordano even playing badly, though? Sure, he's bleeding chances, but his QualComp and CorsiRelQCOMP are better. However...his Corsi REL, CorsiRelQTEAM and ZS ratio are worse, while his PDO is 1002 as opposed to 976 last year. Those things, coupled with the eye test and counting numbers suggest to me he is-and his poor play is pretty much completely his fault, unfortunately.