Three-game losing streaks are not fun, as this week proved. The Islanders dropped two games on their Florida loop, and now head back to Brooklyn for a Tuesday game against Vancouver. But, there’s actually been some interesting data which shows the Islanders performing at a somewhat higher level than they were at the start of the season.
Yesterday, fellow contributor Travis Flynn touched on this idea by looking at expected goal rates among Isles’ centers in recent games. Within, he used a five-game rolling average to provide context to the data. This is a really good way to look at trends, using sample sizes that are not small enough to be too noisy, but not large enough where they define an entire season.