No one does numbers like Alan Caldwell over at Small Thoughts at Large which is why I make his blog one of frequent stops. . . . I have been wondering just where this season’s edition of the Portland Winter Hawks ranks in terms of the poorest teams in WHL history. Alan attempts to answer that question with what follows (yes, I lifted it but you should visit there to see all kinds of great numbers):
“In the all-time annals of the WHL, where do this year’s and last year's Hawks rank among the worst teams? Not just in terms of wins and losses, but in how badly they lose? To figure this out, I took all the standings going back to 1978-79 and calculated how many goals each team scored each season for every goal they gave up. A team with a value of 2, for example, scored twice as many as it gave up. Using that stat, the 10 worst WHL teams of the last 30 years are:
89-90 Victoria Cougars: 221GF, 565GA = 0.391
79-80 Great Falls Americans: 73GF, 186GA = 0.392
83-84 Winnipeg Warriors: 239GF, 580GA = 0.412
07-08 Portland Winter Hawks: 112GF, 260GA = 0.431
90-91 Victoria Cougars: 201GF, 437GA = 0.46
06-07 Portland Winter Hawks: 146GF, 316GA = 0.462
03-04 Saskatoon Blades: 140GF, 279GA = 0.502
81-82 Spokane Flyers: 102GF, 196GA = 0.52
04-05 Regina Pats: 154GF, 285GA = 0.54
01-02 Vancouver Giants: 198GF, 365GA = 0.542
The 79-80 Americans and 81-82 Flyers are asterisk teams since they both folded mid-season. And the 01-02 Giants were an expansion team so can be cut some slack for being bad.
But you can see that this season's Portland team (so far) is fourth-worst, with last season's being sixth-worst.”
The last sentence makes this truly frightening for Winter Hawks fans. In the last two seasons, this franchise has laid down two of the ugliest seasons in WHL history. It is going to be interesting to see whether the organization as it is presently constituted is able to come back from this and, if so, how long it will take for it to become respectable again. If you look at the other teams on the list, only Saskatoon and Regina were able to follow up those horrific seasons with immediate success, the Blades improving to 37 victories (they went from 40 victories in 2002-03 to 7 to 37 to 41) and the Pats going from 12 to 40 to 36. The Giants, who won 13 games in their first season, followed that up with 26. . . . Putting two terrible seasons together back-to-back surely indicates the amount of work that needs to be done in Portland.
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