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Everyone knows Ottawa is struggling so far this season. Through November 22, the Senators had only 20 points in 18 games, which is a pace for 91 over a full season. That’s not a bad total, but this is a team that should easily clear 100 points, and should challenge for the President’s Trophy as the league’s best team. Including overtime losses as losses (which is something you should always do), the Sens are only 8-8-2 this year. With all their talent, why have they been struggling?

The answer is…they haven’t. That’s right, the team is not struggling. They appear to be, if you look only at points, but that’s just bad luck.

The fact is they’ve played only 18 games so far. 18 games are not enough to evaluate a team’s performance. Indeed, 82 games may not even be enough. On top of that, if you want to evaluate a team’s performance, you should be looking less at their points and more at their goals.

There’s a simply formula that can be used to extrapolate a team’s expected winning percentage based on its goals scored and its goals allowed. This is called Pythagorean analysis, and the formula is as follows:

E(Pct) = GF^2 / (GF^2 + GA^2)

You take the square of a team’s goals, and divide it by the sum of the square of a team’s goals and the square of its goals against. A team scoring and allowing the same number of goals will be expected to play .500 hockey, and that is usually the case. There is no evidence that deviations are the result of anything but luck. Note that the idiotic point-for-an-OT-loss rule gums this up a bit, but the effect is small enough to be ignored for our purposes here.

Using this formula, Ottawa (with 57 goals for and 40 goals against at November 22) should have a winning percentage of .670. They’re actually at .500 (ignoring OT losses), meaning they’ve been very unlucky thus far.

But more important is this: Pythagorean expected winning percentage is a far better predictor of future success (in terms of points) than is actual winning percentage. That is, it is far more likely that Ottawa will play .670 hockey the rest of the season than it is for them to play .500 hockey. They have not been struggling. They’ve simply been very unlucky.

So what if Ottawa does play .670 hockey the rest of the season? Well, over their remaining 64 games, a .670 winning percentage would translate into 86 points. Add in, say, three more OT losses, for 89 points. Then add what they currently have (20), and you wind up with a 109-point season. Not too shabby. That total would put them at or near the top of the league, and it’s about what should be expected from a team of this calibre.

The lesson is, before jumping on the media bandwagon, look deeper into the numbers to see if what is being presented as fact actually is. You’ll often be surprised by what you find.