1st 3rd vs. last 2 3rds

A few things happened with the Canadiens about 1/3 of the way through the season. The biggest thing was a changing of the guard on the top line - it was early December when Koivu/Higgins/Ryder gave way to Plekanec/AKostitsyn/Kovalev for the top role. This is also when Ryder first became familiar with the 3rd/4th lines and the press box. Lapierre and S. Kostitsyn were called up from Hamilton, while Grabovski was sent down and Chipchura soon followed.So it's interesting to look at what happened to players' stats before and after this point. I regularly saved copies of the behindthenet stats throughout the season just for this purpose. Here are the EV numbers:Click for an image you can actually see, and my apologies for the lack of logical sorting.From these tables, we can spot some team wide trends:The shooting% started out ridiculously low, then changed to ridiculously high. Part of that is the switch to the Plekanec line which definitely produces higher shot quality, b...