I want to take a look at the players who have been scoring the most goals in the first few games of the SMJHL season. While looking through the index I noticed both some interesting trends and aberrations in the table and wanted to explore those by diving deeper into the statistics.

The first thing I noticed is that not a single defender has scored more than two in the first week of play. This isn't exactly unexpected considering the limits that are imposed on defenders in terms of shooting range, and their general positioning on the ice on offense. Seeing the variation in scoring in other positions would suggest that one hard or soft-capped defender with big minutes and powerplay chances would hit the back of the net a few more times in the first handful of games. As a defender, I'm a little disappointed that there seems to be a cap on what we can do offensively, but I'll do what I can to push those limits in the coming seasons.

So what positions have been scoring? Only two centers have met or cleared the three goal threshold whereas ten wings have achieved that number thus far. Clearly wings are the premier scoring position in the J, I for one theorize that this is because centers dump TPE into faceoffs and wingers do not. This is probably a well known observation to more experienced players, but as a rookie I think it's pretty cool that you can see it show up on the stats table of the index. Another reason could be the tendency for three wings to play on powerplay units with only one defender at the point. More scoring opportunities with a man advantage means more goals, simple as that.

Another observation is the games played. Only three players out of the twelve who hit the three goal threshold have played in five games, none have played in four (only one team has played four games). This shows early in the season it's a matter of more ice time, means more goal scoring opportunities, means more goals. Another mundane observation, but relevant nonetheless.

Now we get into the aberrations. The actual ice time. We see Vincent Wolfe of the Kraken who has registered over 20 minutes per night to get his three goals, and on the other end of the spectrum we see Pavel Kharlamov of the Scarecrows playing just 12:44 per night to get to three goals. An interesting observation from this is that nearly a third of the time Kharlamov spends on the ice is on the powerplay. This is how two of his three goals have been generated this season. When looking at total ice time, Kelowna's Danny C leads the way with 114 mins and 6 seconds, whereas the aforementioned Kharlamov has only logged 63 minutes and 40 seconds, nearly half the time Danny C has been on the ice. So it's pretty crazy to see how vast the range is and how little of an effect it seems to have, especially considering how many veterans warned me that points could be pretty much directly traced to this factor.

The final factor I wanted to touch on is the lack of variety of teams in this list of twelve players. Again this could have to do with the extra game played by five of the twelve teams in the league, but only three of those five teams comprise the list of teams that have three goal scorers. Just six teams comprise this entire list: Colorado and Kelowna each have three of the twelve total players, Quebec City and Anaheim each have two players on the list, and the final two players play for Carolina and St. Louis. The teams with multiple players happen to be the top four highest scoring teams in the league, so this isn't surprising, but the final two teams are a bit of a surprise. Wolfe's three goals for Carolina make up a quarter of his team's goal output, if that was impressive, Kharlamov's three goals make up a total of 30% of St. Louis's goals, so these players appear to be firing on higher cylinders than the rest of their teammates. We'll see if this trend holds up this year or if their goal scoring ways dwindle as their teams struggle to create offense.



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