Next time you decide to quote an almost month old post of mine, can you make sure you actually read it? At least if you're going to make snide remarks in your attempted rebuttal?
I was quite clearly talking about the 2016-17 season when I said that "the goalies had worse save percentages". He had similar shots against as this season, but worse save percentages, leading to a GA/60 of almost 3.0.
Next time you refer to season
before last season, it's better to
not refer to it as "last season". Well, that doesn't make much sense either, as it's not that when Laine is on ice without Ehlers Helle is just magically much better than when Ehlers is on ice with Laine. You don't just have a point, sorry. Also CA/60 without quality factors tells you almost nothing.
I don't think anybody expected rookie Laine (16-17) to be as good defensively as sophmore Laine (17-18), so the
relative improvement against other TOP 6 wingers in terms of results (GA/60) was expected. Also when your offence is down, you have to concentrate even more on D to compensate that. In his rookie season he din't play that much on ELL line so his 5-on-5 results in terms of GF/60 were impressive as well as the net goal differential Gdiff/60. As the improvement was
relative to other guys having the exact same goaltenders behind them, you cannot address Laine having vastly improved GA/60 when compared to eg. Wheeler and Ehlers to improvements by Helle, that's just nonsense if you think a split second about it.
If your point is that CF/60 & CA/60 is the reality and GF/60 and GA/60 are just too random to take into account, well, then you have a point. I don't agree with that however, as we have seen that several guys like Scheifele and Laine in particular break those models consistently so there is no correlation between CF/60 and GF/60, and therefore it has to be that there is no correlation between CA/60 and GA/60 either. Quality over quantity.
