At times I find myself just exploring the Frozen Tools section just because I almost always find something new to look at or something that catches my eye. It is an incredibly powerful selection of tools and data to answer specific questions and much of what we column in this series is just that. Whether that is looking for rising deployment or time on ice, comparing expected goals, or figuring out if a player's performance is sustainable. But sometimes when I am exploring the tools, I end up finding answers to questions I didn't think to ask and today is definitely one of those times.

It started, as if often the case, with the Report Generator. The varying reports, plus the flexibility in setting the parameters makes this page a great jumping-off point. Often I use and refer to the Big Board report as that report contains a lot of the basic information we need to check in on a player's performance. This week I started exploring the Top EV Line report. I ran it for forwards for the season and it lays out each line's goals for and against, shots for and against, and Corsi for and against. I exported the data so I can share some tables here, but also added a column or two which we will get to in a moment.

First off though, the top results. The following table shows the top ten even-strength lines sorted by goals for, which is how the table is displayed on the report.

A lot of not surprising info here. The line with Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Gabriel Landeskog is leading the pack, Vegas is very well represented, with both of their top two lines in the top ten. Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are here, as is Patrick Kane. No real surprise from Sidney Crosby, Jake Guentzel, and Bryan Rust either. Two interesting notes though are how productive Logan Couture, Evander Kane, and Kevin Labanc have been. E. Kane has had a great season, but as a Labanc owner for a lot of the season, it doesn't feel like he made much of an impact. The real surprise here is Blake Coleman, Yanni Gourde, and Barclay Goodrow being the lone representatives from Tampa.

That brings us to the main drawback in looking at the data this way. We don't have a specific time on ice listings here so we don't know how much time it took for these lines to amass their respective goal totals, and we also miss out on players who have been on rotating lines. Notice we don't have Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl here. Part of that is that they have done a lot of damage on the power play, but some of it is also that their lines have shifted, particularly their "third pieces."

But data drawbacks aside, I did want to draw out attention to the change column, or the difference between goals for and goals against. You may notice some pretty dramatic totals there. Some, like the San Jose line, are scoring a lot, but also getting scored on. Some, like the MacKinnon line score a ton, but have a reasonable amount scored on them as well, and then you get Tomas Tatar, Brendan Gallagher, and Phillip Danault who have only three goals scored on them all season at even strength.

To explore this a bit further – the lines that are doing well at suppressing goals against as well as scoring – I took the Delta number and represented it as a percent of the GF number. This essentially highlights lines where there is a big difference between GF and GA, but attempts to normalize somewhat. The top five are below.

The Tatar line takes the cake, but Valeri Nichushkin, Joonas Donskoi, and Tyson Jost have a particularly strong differential here too making two Colorado lines on this list. We also see McDavid and Draisaitl at last.

The overall report also presents the shots for and shots against. I could certainly present those here as well, but I decided to compare the shot totals to the goal totals and essentially get the shooting percentage of the line, both for and against. In the table below I have listed the lines with the top five shooting percentages.

It is no surprise to see McDavid and Draisaitl listed here, twice. They are two elite players whose own shooting percentages are consistently above 15 percent. Our Minnesota players though? The best they usually offer ranges from about 9 to 12 percent. All of those players have sky-high shooting percentages right now. There isn't much time left in the season, but regressing back to their usual percentages for a few weeks would crush their production (as is already starting to happen for Jordan Greenway and Joel Eriksson Ek).

In sort of the reverse, we can also look at the shooting percentages of the players against our lines. The top five in that category are listed below.

Based on some of our earlier tables, there aren't too many surprising names here, though Travis Zajac's line in New Jersey brings up some new names. The difficult thing here is that I don't have a lot of data on how consistently repeatable this specific shooting percentage number is, though if we take a look at some player's PDO (which would essentially combine the two above stats) we get an idea of how things look.

Take Tatar for example. If the above shooting percentage was not going to stick, we would likely see it in his PDO. His on-ice save percentage would be too high and when added to his on-ice shooting percentage it would be well over 1000 (the expected average). His PDO is 1018 which is on the higher end of his personal range, but not an unsustainable rate. His line's shooting percentage isn't all that abnormal either. Taken together the line's production and goal suppression looks like the real deal from that measure.

Marcus Foligno, on the other hand has a PDO of 1074, which is considerably higher than both league average and any PDO he has put up in his career history. A big chunk of that is the shooting percentages from above, but it could also imply that his goal suppression with this line was not entirely due to their skillful performances.

So with all of that go forth and use the Top EV Line Report.

That is all for this week. Thanks for reading. Stay safe out there.

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