concerns regarding goals against?

[coolasprICE]

It's 5 games. I'd be more concerned if we're not scoring

 

[Hackett]

Bad turnovers at even strength, and a passive penalty kill are the two main culprits in my opinion. Its fixable though. The horses are there.

 

[neopreneur]

The goals against stat sticks out like a sore thumb, especially since we got blown out 1-7 against the Rangers.

This Habs team is capable of better hockey though so passing judgement after 5 games is premature. I'd think the 20 game mark would be a better sample size to start making knowledgable assessments. For now, I'm enjoying the 4-1 start!

On a side note, hockey is a sport with a high amount of luck involved... which means that we need a very large sample size of games in order to accurately rate teams. Below is and excerpt from an HBR article that explains this:

[...]when there’s lots of luck, you need a large sample size to ensure that luck evens out and skill shines through. Baseball has a lot of luck, but you can be reasonably confident that the better teams make the playoffs because the regular season includes 162 games (over 27,500 minutes).

To make this concrete, we can calculate the number of games you need in the NBA and the NHL to get an equivalent contribution of skill and luck. Because basketball has lots of skill, you only need 10-15 games, or about 15% of the season, to obtain the same signal that you get from 70-75 hockey games, or nearly 90% of the season.​

source: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/01/skill-luck-and-the-nhls-shorte/

 

[Rosso Scuderia]

It's the Gorges effect.