This is probably the most common question about PDO, and the answer is nothing. Looking at these examples, if it were halfway through the season, we would expect the even strength play of Team A to suffer a bit, and Team B to get better. This can also be applied to players, although with players it gets much more tricky because there are more variables and smaller sample sizes. For teams, it's just even strength shooting and save percentages.īecause shooting percentage and save percentage for the whole league totalled up will always be even, the league's PDO number will add up to 100%, or 1.0 if you're using decimals.īecause of this we know that the average team will have a PDO of 1.0, and we can therefore predict that a team with a PDO lower than 1.0 will likely see a performance increase, and a team with a PDO above 1.0 is likely to see a performance decrease.
Same goes for on-ice save percentage, only it's the goaltender's save percentage while that player is on the ice. It's something a single player has limited control over. The purpose of saying on-ice is to note that the shooting percentage is the team's shooting percentage while that player is on the ice. On-ice is meant to refer specifically to players, but I'm using it for both just to keep things simple. The way that this is accomplished is by taking two relatively stable statistics, even strength on-ice shooting percentage and even strength on-ice save percentage, and adding them together.īefore we get too deep into PDO, it's important to define those two stats as well. PDO is a statistic that's used to determine whether a player or team's performance over a set sample is sustainable.