Detroit Red Wings: Anthony Mantha has been unlucky according to his PDO

The Detroit Red Wings continue to press on with the 2020-21 season, and Anthony Mantha got off to quite the slow start. Mantha has found his way up the Red Wings leaderboard for points.

However, looking at another stat, Mantha is dead last on the Detroit Red Wings, and it might explain why there was so much outcry. Taking a look at one of the advanced metrics might lead to some realizations regarding Mantha’s performance.

For this, turn to PDO, which does not stand for anything specific but is a measure of luck for hockey players. This advances metric ranks players in terms of how lucky or unlucky they are getting during a particular season.

PDO has a standard rating of 100, which would be not favoring the lucky side of things or the unlucky side of things. The ratings that are above 100 would lean towards the luckier side of things, meaning that players are getting good bounces or are just simply getting things to go their way.

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On the flip side, things below 100 would point to a player not getting the puck luck or bounces that favor them.

Generally speaking, most players would fall between a five number radius, with 100 being the center point.

Most players sit between 98-102, but like all things, there are outliers.

Looking at Anthony Mantha’s PDO for the Detroit Red Wings in 2020-21, he is one of the outliers.

In 2020-21, the Detroit Red Wings have a pretty sporadic grouping of players on their PDO leaderboard, with Anthony Mantha being dead last on these rankings.

He is nowhere near 100 and is quite far from even being in that normal 98-102 range.

Mantha’s PDO currently sits at 92.1, which extremely low. This is well below the target area that he should want to be in. Through 16 games in 2020-21, Mantha has produced five goals and four assists for nine total points.

However, most were expecting Mantha to be scoring goals left and right for the Red Wings, or at least at a better rate to start the 2020-21 season. Mantha has not quite found that scoring touch, but this meager 92.1 PDO rating might have contributed to that.

Based on this, it could be concluded that Mantha is getting unlucky. Now, the fact that Mantha was looking “lazy” to start the season might play into that. But before bringing Mantha before the flames and freaking out, he may not totally be at fault.

Mantha not getting any bounces and being unlucky with his 92.1 PDO rating means that he should be cut some slack.