Jason Gregor provides some news, notes, numbers, and rumblings ahead of tonight’s matchup against the Winnipeg Jets.

>>Kailer Yamamoto sat out Saturday night in Vancouver. Many wondered if the Oilers are planning on stretching out his nine games played over a long period of time. Peter Chiarelli told me prior to the start of the season that won’t happen.”We’re not doing that with Kailer. You reach a point of diminishing returns where you don’t want a player sitting around and not playing. He may miss a game here or there and it’s all going to depend on performance. If he’s not performing, he’s not maintaining a certain level and he starts sitting, then that’s probably indicative of the fact that he’s not ready to play. If he’s maintaining the performance you’re probably going to see him in nine straight games, if he’s maintaining the performance.” He struggled in game one and sat out game two. He is back in tonight and the injury to Drake Caggiula could keep him around a bit longer, but if he struggles tonight I could see the Oilers sending him down right away. After tonight they only play one game in the next eight days.

>>The Jets have had eleven powerplays in two games. Only Nashville and Ottawa (12) are averaging more power plays per game. The Oilers took one penalty in game one, but had seven versus Vancouver. The Jets had the fourth most PP chances last year, 264, but they were 18th in PP efficiency at 18.2%. You would think their PP would be better with the offensive weapons they have at forward and on defence.

>>The NHL is not a developmental league. I debated for years with many who felt the coaches should just play the young guys, to get them experience. It doesn’t work that way. If they play well, they will play, but coaches are paid to win games. You can use the “just play them” strategy in the AHL, but not in the NHL. Now that the Oilers are a good team, any young player will need to earn his ice time. We saw it with Jesse Puljujarvi and we are seeing it with Yamamoto. He turned the puck over twice in the first period of game one and his ice time was limited. He’ll play again tonight, and if he plays well he will see the ice, but if he struggles he won’t. Winning organizations don’t just give players ice time, they make them earn it, and when they are ready to play and contribute they, and the team, are better off because of it.

>>The Oilers PP hasn’t looked as crisp as you’d expect, especially the first unit. The same five players are back, and their approach on the man advantage is similar to last year where they were one of the best units in the NHL. I’m sure the PP will get going, but in Vancouver, on Saturday the #1 unit wasn’t sharp. They need to play with the same urgency and attacking mentality they had last season.

>>Mark Letestu had five goals and six points in three games vs. the Jets last season. He has nine goals in 15 career games vs. the Thrashers/Jets organization. In his first season with the Oilers he had no points in three games vs. Winnipeg, but he owned them last year. He had 1-2-3 in two preseason games this year vs. the Jets and they are a team he loves playing.

The Nation Network has become partners with the analytics website Corsica. I believe analytics adds some intriguing aspects to hockey, but I think one area they’ve struggled is in the messaging. If you are a newbie, it can be difficult to understand certain aspects. So every few weeks in our QUICK HITS, Manny Perry, the brains behind Corsica, will answer a few questions.

Manny: “I think the biggest difference is this version of Corsica is built for longevity. Building the first iteration was kind of a sprint, and I spent more time than I care to admit patching things up. I like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes, and part of my motivation in doing this was to address parts of the infrastructure that I knew I could improve upon. Although I think this new version looks better than the original, this was more than just a cosmetic redesign. Of course, I also took the opportunity to implement new features.

Among those I’m most excited about are WAR and the new Predictions section. The latter is driven by a prediction contest I’ve been overseeing since earlier this Summer. 20 people, including myself, are responsible for submitting daily win probabilities for games during the 2017-2018 regular season. The Predictions page consolidates these probabilities and keeps a running score of each model’s success. Included in the competition are Dom Luszczyszyn’s model, Micah McCurdy’s model Edgar and my own model Salad.

Manny: I believe “K”, a metric of my own concoction, is probably the best total team metric we have in the public sphere. It attempts to aggregate the various ways by which a team can perform – well, poorly or anywhere on that spectrum – into a single number. Beyond that, xGF% (Expected Goals For percentage) gives a good indication of a team’s performance by combining shot quantity and quality. Things like shooting and save percentage are clearly important, but they should be used with caution and preferably diluted to avoid getting carried away by the influence of luck in hockey.

No single statistic (yet), even “K”, is able to tell the whole story on its own. Combining statistics is important, but it’s often done improperly, by arbitrarily weighting the relative importance of metrics. Incidentally, “K” attempts to tackle this problem. There’s still plenty of room to improve here, but a good policy is to ask yourself, “How much does this really matter?” Each time you should ask, “how good is Team X at Statistic Y?”

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