Hi. My name is Geoff and I am a Matt Read skeptic. Surely this isn't news to most of you - what aren't I skeptical about? - but sometimes, it's good to admit these things openly.

If you recall, when the Flyers signed Matt Read in March of last year, I was heavy on the skepticism. Signing a 24 year old undrafted college player is playing the odds already. Hoping they become a 15 goal scorer their rookie year is like wishing for a Golden Ticket, but only buying two Wonka bars; it is so unlikely it's difficult to calculate the chances.*

Yet here we are, 50 games into the season and Matt Read already has 16 goals in 47 games. This was highly unexpected to say the least, but just how unexpected is it?

*Yes, I know he got a third for his birthday.

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Ed. Note: Yeah, there's a game between now and the Rangers game on Sunday. We're allowed to look ahead. We don't play for the Flyers.

Now that Geoff has accumulated more than half a season of zone entry data, I wanted to take a look at head-to-head matchups and see whether anything interesting came out of comparing the opponents.

I pulled the data for the seven teams the Flyers had faced at least three times, and something surprising jumped out at me right away: the Flyers have absolutely killed the Rangers in the neutral zone.

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We've been tracking zone entries for the Flyers since last year's playoffs, keeping track of who sent the puck into the zone and how they did it (by dumping it, carrying it, etc).

This has allowed us to extract a lot of numbers, answering questions like "which players most often keep control of the puck at the blue line?" or "how often do the Flyers win the neutral zone and advance the puck to the offensive end?"

In this mid-season review of the zone entry data, we will update those answers through game 41. We will also try to test the questions themselves, looking to see which numbers are stable enough that we should put faith in them.

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Get ready to take every preconceived idea you've ever had about the way the Philadelphia Flyers operate and throw it out the door. These are the new Flyers. The tame Flyers. The Brendan Shanahan-is-watching-you Flyers. Via Puck Daddy, emphasis ours:

"Philadelphia told me about Zac Rinaldo," said Shanahan. "He's a really big hitter. Hits hard. But they said to him that if you see 20 hits a game in your head, pick the best three. That's enough to be a physical, intimidating player in this League. When I hear coaching like that, that's when I'm thinking there's full buy-in there."

You're not going to get an argument out of me that this isn't the way things should be. Physical play is good, but only when it's smart. That's from a discipline perspective (not taking so many damned penalties) and a safety perspective -- we don't want every player in the league to go down with injury thanks to dirty hits.

The conventional wisdom when it comes to the Flyers says that they're never going to adhere to a tamer style. They are stuck in the past, and they're never going to comprise a physical presence for anything -- whether the NHL says they should or not. That's what we've believed since the 70s, right?

I've gotta say, this makes me a little proud of the organization I've spent my entire life rooting for. But is it necessarily smart from a hockey perspective?

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Stefan Legein, formerly a prospect in the Flyers organization, was a second-round draft pick in 2007. In his final two junior seasons with the Niagara IceDogs, Legein played 94 games and scored 112 points.

His skill is NHL-caliber, and yet, he's never played a game in the NHL. Not even a sniff. Legein even retired from hockey at age 19 before ultimately coming back to the game a few months later. Two years and a trade to the Flyers organization later, he was demoted from the Phantoms to the ECHL for a time. In October, the Flyers shipped him to the Kings organization for future considerations. In other words, they gave him away for nothing.

Compare Legein to a guy like Harry Zolnierczyk. Not even a point per game player in ECAC Hockey, where the competition is not nearly as high as the Ontario Hockey League. Undrafted. Broke into the pros at age 23, three years after Legein. That certainly sets him back quite a bit in his development as a player.

But here Harry Z sits, a contributing piece on a team that's in the running for the top spot in the Eastern Conference this season. Legein, meanwhile, is still toiling away in the AHL, now a member of his third professional organization. Why is that?

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Originally wrote this back in September. Considering All-Star Weekend is just about here in both the AHL and NHL, it seems timely to bump it up again now. I hope the AHL All-Star Game on Monday in Atlantic City isn't a failure, but...

The American Hockey League announced on Thursday afternoon that their 2012 All-Star Classic will be held in Atlantic City. All the important details:

• When: Sunday, January 29 at 3 p.m. (All-Star Skills Competition) and Monday, January 30, 2012 at 7 p.m. (All-Star Game).
• Where: Historic Boardwalk Hall, 2301 Boardwalk, Atlantic City, N.J.
• Tickets go on sale Monday, September 12 at the Boardwalk Hall Box Office or through Ticketmaster. $52 for seats on the glass, $37 for lower-level seats and $32 for upper-level seats. Includes admission to both events.
• Click here to view the entire press release from the AHL and the ACCVA. It's a .doc file.

For those of us who love AHL hockey and live in Philadelphia or points east, this is fantastic news. Boardwalk Hall is a beautiful venue for hockey (or anything, really) and the AHL All-Star Game is a great event. At the same time, there are plenty of questions here.

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I've seen a number of discussions lately about the best way to predict future goaltender performance. The analytical community showed long ago that because a goalie doesn't see very many PK shots per year, simple luck doesn't come anywhere near balancing out and a goalie's PK Sv% bounces around almost completely randomly from year to year.

From that, it was natural to infer that the penalty kill just adds noise to our measurement of goalies and that we should focus on even strength save percentage (ES Sv%) instead of total save percentage. This would also presumably remove any unfair advantage a goalie gets in total save percentage by playing for a team that doesn't take many penalties. And so it became a widespread belief that ES Sv% was the best measure of goalie talent.

I personally made that argument just a few days ago, arguing that James Reimer's ES Sv% is a better predictor of his future results than his overall Sv% is. And yet when I went looking for an article that showed this directly, that made the leap from theoretical to empirical, I couldn't find any.

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Earlier today, I posted a look at how adjustments for score effects can help us make better predictions than narrowing our sample size to look just at tied games. Let's take a quick look at where Score-Adjusted Fenwick differs from Fenwick Tied for this year's teams (thanks to George E. Ays for the suggestion).

Full table after the jump.

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