Part I.V: The Aftermath... Jakub Voracek and Rick Nash WOWY Analysis

Chase asked me to do some number crunching on Voracek. To be honest, I found the results surprising. The numbers indicate that Voracek is highly underrated and was a great pickup. It appears that he, not Rick Nash, was Driving Play at even strength in Columbus.

Here is how Columbus did at even strength with both goalies in net with both Nash and Voracek on the ice, one of them on and neither of them:

2010-2011 ES	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	67	690.2	5.824	0.499
Nash only	-6	405.1	-0.889	-0.136
Voracek only	71	414.3	10.283	0.399
Neither	-11	2453.9	-0.269	0.214

It surprised me that in the 20 periods worth of ice time he was without Voracek, the guy with the sixth most shots taken in the league (including PP) was negative, albeit slightly. It's too small of a sample to take the exact numbers seriously, but it's interesting to note that when Voracek was off the ice not only was Nash a negative-Corsi player but Columbus actually did better without him than with him. Voracek, on the other hand, did quite well without Nash. He did so against tougher competition.

This pattern also held if you look only at situations where the score was tied:

2010-2011 tied	Corsi	Time	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	55	256.9	12.844	0.192
Nash	-13	155.3	-5.023	0.002
Voracek	15	140.5	6.408	0.66
Neither	-52	946.9	-3.295	0.021

Let's expand the sample by throwing in 2009-2010, when they spent more time apart. Here's all 5-on-5 minutes:

2009-2011	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	59	713.2	4.963	0.528
Nash only	-61	1507.2	-2.428	1.325
Voracek only	65	1421.1	2.744	0.773
Neither	-253	4184.4	-3.628	0.497

and when the score was tied:

2009-2011 Tied	Corsi	Time (mins)	Corsi/60	OppCorsi
Both	55	262.8	12.559	0.265
Nash	-20	584	-2.055	1.439
Voracek	34	508.9	4.009	0.646
Neither	-164	1585.8	-6.205	0.468

Nash had tougher competition in his time without Voracek than vice versa, but Voracek's numbers are far better. I'll write a lot more on quality of competition later and come up with something more precise, but according to my rough calculations it looks like Voracek was somewhere between 4 and 4.5 Corsi shots better per 60 when you take the tougher opposition into account. Maybe a little higher if you only look at tied-score minutes.

Before the flood of angry emails from Jackets' fans comes in, I'd like to point out that this is all for 5-on-5 play. It appears that Nash was carrying the water on the Power Play, maybe the fans yelling "SHOOT" for the entire damn power play are smarter than we think, and he also played about 19% of Columbus' PK time. In both cases, the Jackets had better Corsi numbers when he was on the ice than off.

Expect Voracek to play a big role for the Flyers at 5-on-5 this season.