How the Canadiens' Smoking-Hot Start Compares to Last Year's Early-Season Surge

With the Montreal Canadiens off to their best ten-game start in franchise history for the second straight season, there have been many comparisons between the two starts, with some fans confident that this team is much better than last year's edition, and some slightly nervous that it could all come crumbling down like last season did in December.

Barring an injury to Carey Price, it's unlikely the Canadiens see the same sort of struggles this season that they did last, but how comparable are the starts to each other?

The most obvious thing to compare early on is score-adjusted Corsi at 5vs5, which is a robust, tested statistic that predicts future goals for and against, and wins, much more efficiently than past goals and wins do.

Unfortunately for this season's edition of the Canadiens, their possession game hasn't started off as strongly as last season's did, hindered primarily by struggling to break the puck out of their own zone with possession. After ten games last season, the Habs were rocking a stellar 53.3 percent score-adjusted Corsi, among the top marks in the league, whereas this season they're sitting at 49.4 percent, in the bottom half of the NHL.

Single games have a great impact on cumulative scores at this stage in the season, so the Canadiens could easily rebound, as they've spent most of their first ten contests on the positive side of the ledger, but ten-game samples have more predictive weight than you would think.

Often when a team is struggling in possession but continuing to put up wins, the focus turns to shot quality, so how are the Canadiens performing in terms of generating and defending scoring chances compared to 2015-16?

The trend is slightly different than last season, but where everything ends up after ten games is nearly identical, as, like last year, the Canadiens are having trouble accumulating more scoring chances than their opponents. While the Canadiens started last season hot and declined, this year they've started extremely poorly and improved, only to level off over the last four games.

We know that neither shot quality overall, nor possession of the puck, are in the Canadiens' favour after ten games in 2016-17, so how exactly are they 9-0-1? How were they 9-1-0 last season?

The answer seems to be that both versions of the Habs began the season on extraordinary runs of shooting and saving luck, which can be measured by a statistic called PDO, which combines team shooting percentage with team save percentage. On average, teams will have a PDO very close to 100, as team talent in the salary cap era in terms of shooting and saving percentages is very evenly distributed. There are outliers, of course, and with Carey Price being an abnormally excellent goaltender the Canadiens should expect an above-average PDO. Where do the Canadiens fall on that scale currently? We have to look at both 5vs5 and all situations to fully grasp how things have gone.

Under Michel Therrien, the Canadiens have experienced an average 5vs5 PDO of 100.57 coming into this season, though if we omit last season because of the loss of Price, that jumps to 101.01. In all situations, the Canadiens have had a 100.6 PDO under Therrien, and removing last season that jumps to 101.2. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this club has more shooting talent than any Canadiens teams of the last four years, which is a fair assumption, and that it can crack a 102 PDO by the end of the season. That would be the eighth-highest full-season PDO in the NHL over the last nine years.

That is still a far cry from the 106.11 5vs5 PDO and 107.62 all situations PDO the Canadiens are experiencing so far. We know from years of data that these kinds of numbers aren't sustainable, and tend to regress harshly.

It's not saying anything new or controversial that the Canadiens will lose games at a higher rate the rest of the season than they have so far, but the trouble for this team specifically is that if it has a percentages crash that is anywhere close to what happened last year, it will be in free fall with the way its played so far.

It's unlikely that Price will play like Mike Condon or Ben Scrivens, but a poor shooting percentage run is certainly possible. And as it stands right now, the Canadiens don't get enough scoring chances to dig themselves out of a shooting percentage rut.

This isn't to say that the Habs are a bad team or will miss the playoffs, only that they aren't the invincible titans of the sport that they have looked like so far. As great as the tandem of Price and Al Montoya is, they won't continue to save 96 percent of shots against, and the Canadiens won't continue scoring on 11.6 percent of their shots on goal when league average has been just 8.5 percent the last couple seasons.

The question for this team going forward is how they will handle it when everything isn't going perfectly for them.