On the surface, Mattias Janmark seems like a good addition for the Blackhawks.
In 16 games entering Monday, Janmark had already tallied five goals — one shy of his totals from each of his last two full seasons with the Stars — and nine points.
His quick, shifty skating ability and clever puck placements have been impressive. He’s spent most of the season in a top-six role, too, showing coach Jeremy Colliton’s trust in him.
Yet one glance at Janmark’s possession statistics paints a far uglier portrait.
Janmark ranks dead last among 502 NHL skaters this season in scoring chance ratio: 33.0% (61 for, 124 against) during five-on-five play.
He also ranks dead last in shot attempt ratio: 35.8% (129 attempts for, 231 against) during five-on-five play. And the Hawks have been outscored 12-5 during his five-on-five ice time.
The divides between Janmark’s eye-test and data-driven evaluations are as confusing as they are vast.
Although hockey’s possession proxy statistics have their fair share of critics — shot attempts more than scoring chances — they usually roughly align with the visible ups and downs in player performance. Many analysts would conversely argue the statistics provide more thorough, objective and quantifiable assessments than human perception.
Asked this weekend about the strange contrast, Colliton understandably defended his player but did hint he knew about Janmark’s poor underlying stats.
“It took him a few games to get going, but after that, he had a really good stretch,” Colliton said. “Maybe had a little bit of a drop-off lately, but he’s a veteran guy, he knows how to play. He does a lot of little things that make it easier to play. The possession numbers and different things that we track, we take that into account. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle.”
Making Janmark’s terrible analytics this season even stranger is the fact he graded very well analytically throughout his Stars tenure.
His scoring chance ratio was above 51% three of his four healthy seasons in Dallas and 54.4% last year, ranking 74th in the league.
But when signing with the Hawks in October, Janmark spoke eagerly about his preference for the Hawks’ offensive, counterattacking style over the Stars’ defensive, structurally sound system.
He came to Chicago hoping that change of scenery would change his own game, and it indeed has. Janmark looks like a more assertive, creative playmaker now than he did in his penalty-killing-specialist role with the Stars.
Except the data indicates his increased box-score production might be a mirage: four of his nine points have come on the power play, and in five-on-five play, he’s actually taking far fewer shots than he did in Dallas. And the data definitively doesn’t favor his overall play across all three zones.
Starting two games ago, Janmark was dropped from the first line to the second. His new center, Dylan Strome, tried to offer an explanation for Janmark’s weird numbers.
“Holding onto the puck isn’t necessarily his forte,” Strome said. “[He] helps get pucks back, finds a way to get open. [I] wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing that he doesn’t have a lot of possession, but that’s what happens.”
The flaw with Strome’s explanation is that getting pucks back and distributing to teammates should still lead to shot attempts and scoring chances for the team, which would show up in his numbers. That hasn’t happened.
The good news for Janmark is Saturday’s win over the Blue Jackets was his best game in a while. The Hawks held advantages in shot attempts (13-8) and scoring chances (6-4) during Janmark’s ice time — a huge contrast from the previous five games, during which the Hawks suffered a 54-11 scoring chance deficit during his ice time.
Janmark will hope many more good statistical performances like that will eventually balance his underlying numbers with his visible performance.
