Noon Number (December 11th): 51.9%

The Wild were a big talking point early in the season due to their dramatic change from being traditionally one of the worst puck possession teams in the league to suddenly becoming one of the best seemingly overnight. Chuck Fletcher and Mike Yeo both spoke about the conscious decision they made to revert to a puck possession-focused playing style and received a lot of praise in the advanced stats community.

Since then, the Wild have been steadily falling down the Fenwick For% at 5v5 Close (FenClose%) rankings and are finding it harder to dominate teams the way they did earlier in the year. As you know, FenClose% success has anextremely strong correlation with making the playoffs, making deep playoff runs and winning the Cup.

-Firstly, the game-by game percentages (click to enlarge):

The Wild are currently 10th in the league in FenClose%, with a 51.9% rating. That is still a very good number, especially for a team who have been so terrible at puck possession over the last few years (they averaged 45.9% between 2007 and 2013, good for 29th in the league, with only Edmonton being worse). Finishing the season over 50% will be a huge accomplishment for the organisation and bodes well for the future.

It's hard to point at any particular reason why things haven't been going so well, but some possible reasons are:

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Noon Christmas Tune:

Seeing as we're now into December and Christmas is fast approaching, I'll be featuring a different Christmas song in each of the Noon Numbers I write up until the big day.

Your 5th song of the month is "Holiday Road" by Lindsey Buckingham (covered here by The Walkmen). You might remember this song became a bit of Chicago Blackhawks folklore during their run to the cup last year: