Atlanta Thrashers
How ’bout those Thrashers? Marian Hossa has saved me early in my Hockey Leaks hockey pool (luckily no one knows Yahoo auto-picked Hossa for me before I remembered about my draft and logged in). Anyways, he’s also doing his best to get the Thrashers started on the right foot. Atlanta jumped to a great start to the season, before Ilya Kovalchuk started scoring!. That’s a scary thought.
The Thrashers received excellent goaltending, solid scoring through their lineup, and Vyacheslav Kozlov has been excellent in shootouts, all reasons the Thrashers have started the season 7-1-1.
Now, Atlanta has had a fairly easy schedule. They’ve played Boston and Carolina once each, Tampa Bay and Washington twice each, and Florida three times. The average adjusted winning percentage of those teams, adjusted for games played, is only 0.385 - good enough for the easiest schedule so far in the entire NHL (my adjusted winning percentage treats overtime and shootout victories and losses differently than games that end in regulation).
All in all, my stats how the Thrashers to be slightly overachieving. They’re due for a slip up but not as much as I would have expected a few weeks ago. They are slightly below average in both offence (shots for plus goals for per game) and defence (shots against plus goals against per game). My power rankings currently list Atlanta as being the third strongest in the league, due mostl to the fact that despite their easy schedule, they’re taking advantage and winning hockey games.