Whilst watching the game last night, I was getting increasingly fed-up at our recent complete inability to win the first face-off in either a Power Play, or more importantly a Penalty Kill. Turns out my recollection is the typical you-only-notice-things-when-they're-going-badly (we finished 6-3 on the night!), but I've only found this out after all my research, so I might as well as get something useful out of the last two hours!

Obviously, you have to take a step back when trying to make sense of stats (in particular as I've based my stats on Play-by-Play's), and the first face-off isn't the be-all-and-end-all of either a PK or PP (just look how "good" we were before the Giroux PPG last night), but I don't know of anywhere that stores the stat I would really have liked – zone time.

What's surprised me the most is the advantage teams on the PP have - all bar 5 teams win over 50% of their first PP draws and only 6 win over 50% on the PK. The Bolts are firmly in the middle of both stats (52% on PP, 19th and 45% on the PK, 16th) and basically there is no correlation between the two stats - for every Florida (65% first win, 16.7% PP) there's a Washington (48% first win, 23.8% PP) and there's virtually no link in PK stats.

It confirms what I suspected before, that whilst winning face-offs is an important part of the game, it's a record of a single event in a game of moving parts that cannot really be linked to any other - and also part of the "propaganda" to make it look like we're actually good at something positive! (much like the rant by the Flyers commentators last night, regarding Stammer being second in the league in scoring since last February!)