Lesieur's S70 Performance Update: Installment 3

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Guy Lesieur got off to a very fast start in S70 which got me wondering whether this was a break out year for him. In other words, was the “way too early” analysis of the first six games of the season a sign of things to come or simply an example of the problems with small sample size. The next 5 games continued to bear out the signs of the first 6, but now we come to part 3 of this season-long analysis with double the amount of games under our belts – 22.

 

Twenty-two games is roughly 1/3 of the season (30.5%) and so the analysis should start to be more realistic in terms of predicting season’s end results. In fact, one might even expect slightly better results as Lesieur continues to improve relative to the league as a whole.

 

So, where are we at?

 

Goals

 

After 11 games Guy had the most goals on the Dragons lighting the lamp 4 times. This would annualize out to 26 goals on the season and with Aaltonen and Frostbeard on the team, no one would expect he’d end the year as the number one goal scorer. With another 11 games played, Lesieur now has 8 goals and is still the Dragons’ number one goal scorer (tied with Aaltonen) and having doubled the number of games played and also the number of goals scored is, of course, still on pace for those same 26 goals.

 

I would be thrilled if he were to keep up this pace! This would mean that Guy has become a valuable player for the D.C. Dragons franchise in only his second year in the VHL – and with only one game played in juniors. Well, we shall see when all 72 games are played.

 

It’s also interesting to note that Lesieur is tied with the DC captain and franchise player in goals with one less shot on goal than Aaltonen and with total playing time skewing in favor of Mikko 68% to 32%. One could question whether those Simon T settings actually do anything, but it seems like they do to some extent. Aalton has played roughly 100 more minutes than Lesieur (652 to 555).

 

Assists

 

It is almost the same story on this side of the scoring sheet. Guy had notched 4 assists in the first 11 games for a projected annual total of 26 which was worth 3^rd place on the team. With 22 games played now, Guy almost doubled his total to 7 on the season which would project him for roughly 23 assists on the season, but this has dropped him to 6^th place on the team as his teammates have fortunately picked up the scoring pace and there are more assists to go around.

 

Shots and Shot Percentage

 

It is no suprise that these remain on pace for astronomical numbers compared to last year. Guy is definitely a shoot first player and that’s his role on the team. In S69 he put 145 pucks on net. Over the first 11 games Lesieur was on pace to tally 307 and that has only increased in the last 11 games. For S70, Guy has fired 97 shots on goal which annualizes out to an incredible 317 – more than double his total for the prior year.  His shot percentage continues to hover around 8% (8.25% slightly down from the 8.51% of the first 11 games).  Imagine what he could do, if he could just improve this into the double digits.  Even a 10% success rate would translate to 30+ goal seasons based on his shot totals.

 

All in all, whereas we cannot be sure that he will continue to perform at this level, there are two things we can tell: 1) there are no signs yet of his performance falling off the table now that we have played 30% of the season, and 2) Guy Lesieur has a bright future in the VHL.