Goals, assists, time-on-ice, even plus-minus. There are a lot of stats hockey fans pay attention to on a daily basis. These stats give us some idea of what kind of contributions our boys are making to the team's fortunes. We decide whether they are under- or over-performing based largely on these factors.

But, let's face it. They don't tell us everything. Not even close. It's a team effort to score goals, and assists and plus-minus only partially help us understand what goes into creating a win or a loss.

Luckily (?!) there are a number of other stats available, if you look a little harder. These can clarify some questions about who is doing what on the ice. I thought that this week I'd take a look at a few of the less quoted stats to get a somewhat fuller picture of what kinds of contributions different players are making. [Note all of these are players with 10 or more games played and are current through Saturday night (Feb. 11).]

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t's been a while since we talked about what's going on with the Lightning's team statistics. The last time I took a look at the numbers was at the end of December, around game 37. So maybe it's time for another update. This is going to be a bit of a numbers-dump, so bear with me, and I'll get to a real point in here. Hopefully, you won't feel too much like this when I'm done:

via a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net

Since the New Year the Bolts have played fourteen games. In that time, they've gone 6-6-2, gaining 50% of possible points (14 of 28). Included in that span were both the longest losing streak (seven games) and the longest winning streak (five games) of the season. Fans are still asking what went wrong and whether it's been fixed.

I'm concerned about four categories of stats: puck possession, depth scoring, special teams, and goaltending. Some of these I've looked at before and some I haven't, but here I'm basically considering how things are developing in this second half of the season compared to the first half.

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Hockey fans love narratives and writers love creating them. Narratives give the human mind explanations, explanations we then generalize and apply to other situations. A favorite narrative among fans and writers alike is "The Savior," in which a single player comes onto a team in the middle of a season of struggle and by his very presence turns everything around. We've heard this one a lot around here over the past year, and it goes like this:

The Tampa Bay Lightning struggled throughout the first part of the 2010-11 season, with shoddy defense and worse goaltending. On New Years' Day, the Jedi Master (Lightning General Manager Steve Yzerman) took a risk on an aging samurai goaltender, whose heroic performance over the next three months saved the season and led the team to within one goal of the Stanley Cup final.

This story's almost always followed by, "Yzerman should do that again."

The problem is that, while that's a great story, reality is a lot more complex than the narrative allows for. This is still a team game, and it takes more than just good goaltending to make the playoffs. The case for "The Goalie Savior" may be thinner than some want to believe. For one thing, it is nearly impossible, especially given the measurements we currently have, to separate individual goaltender performance from team defense. We shouldn't forget that while Yzerman did bring Dwayne Roloson in on January 1, he also brought in Eric Brewer on February 18. And that trade mattered, too.

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