by Todd Maternowski

The margin of error for this in-depth study is +/- five games.

Good morning, hockey fans! Here's hoping the first 1/16th of the season has treated you well. Last week, we handed out some pretty impressive hardware for the winners of the 2009-10 NHL On-Pace Awards; this week, I was planning on exposing the new Dallas Stars head coach's stylistic shortfalls in Chewing Out Crawford: Giving the Old Man A Piece of His Own Medicine, when I casually glanced up at the NHL standings and realized hey, maybe this Crawford guy isn't as bad as he's cracked up to be.

One tried-and-true principle of human sports fan behavior is the Roster Potential Phenomenon. Virtually every hard-core fan in any sport can glance up and down his favorite team's lineup and get unrealistically giddy about his team's future prospects based entirely on each individual player's potential.

Crawford may have a few blemishes (and not won anything since the mid-90s), but overall things are looking good.

For example, San Jose Sharks fans have, for years, expected to win the Stanley Cup on the basis of players like Thornton, Michalek, Pavelski, Cheechoo, etc. performing up to the fans' maximum expectations. (This is twice as true for anyone putting their hopes on any enigmatic Russian forward.) Invariably, some players excel while others fail, resulting in catastrophic blows to the fans' collective egos.

This year's Stars team, however, is actually approaching that mythical plane of Maximized Potential that all sports fans dream about. Obviously, they're not quite there yet -- a 2-0-3 record is not, technically, perfect -- but each forward on the top two scoring lines is doing exactly what they are supposed to.

First off, the top line of Eriksson-Richards-Neal is, simply put, possibly the most productive threesome since Ba'al joined forces with Lucifer and Beelzebub to bring chaos and disorder to the Material Plane ... and the Richards line is catching up fast. Through five games, the Terrible Trio has put up nine goals, just two of which were on the powerplay (i.e., the Eastern Conference Scorer's Crutch). Richards (3-6-9) is in the top ten in the NHL in scoring, while Neal (3-4-7) and Eriksson (3-2-5) are close behind.

All three members of this line are among the top scorers in the NHL -- no small feat there -- and with Richards and Neal at +5, and Eriksson at +4, the line isn't shirking its defensive responsibilities in order to cherry-pick easy goals, either. Thus far in the season, this line is ranked 5th in the NHL in productivity, a single point behind the much-ballyhooed Ovechkin line in Washington.

Making the Stars ridiculously more dangerous is their nominal second line of Morrow-Ribeiro-Benn, which is ranked 6th in the NHL despite getting no love from the hockey media. Brenden Morrow (4-3-7) and Ribeiro (2-5-7) are where we expected them to be, while promising rookie Jamie Benn (1-4-5) is coming along at an insane point-per-game pace.

James Neal (pictured) has been en fuego.

Overall, the early results on Marc Crawford's up-tempo, short-shift aggressive style are in, and the initial reports range from Awesome to Pants-Wettingly Amazing: With four guys in the top 22 scorers in the NHL (two of whom were injured last season, another who was an overlooked rookie) and two guys with statistically-anomalous shooting percentages (Eriksson, the Tony Gywnn of shooting percentage, is 4th in the NHL at .429, Morrow's 8th at .364), the smart fantasy hockey owners who took these players are reaping the dividends for their surplus of faith.

The team is performing at an impressive clip: Third in the league in goals-per-game (3.81), tenth-best powerplay (26.1%, roughly two million times more watchable than last season's debacle), and even 7th in the NHL in faceoffs (52%). When you're sending wave after wave of your own men at the enemy netminder, good things happen.

But what about defensively? Strangely enough, the Stars are currently -- statistically performing quite well, 4th best in the NHL in goals allowed and 5th best in GAA. Nick Grossman (+10) and Stephane Robidas (+8) are #s 1-2 in the entire NHL in plus/minus, and the Stars have four guys in the top 12 in that category.

More tellingly, despite the public perception of Turco's troubles in net, the Stars as a team are 8th in save percentage and 5th in fewest shots allowed -- not too shabby when you consider the adjustments to the new attacking style. Of course, their 65% penalty-killing clip is fourth-worst in the league, and that stat was artificially inflated by facing the Predators' pathetic powerplay prowess last night.

But as any Blackhawk fan knows, stats are meaningless when they're not backed up by wins: In that regard, the first five games have been ... interesting. The team still has yet to lose in regulation, meaning they've gotten points in every game, but the three shootout losses still sting -- a couple of shots ringing in off the post, and the team would be 4-0-1 and the toast of the Pacific Division.

Marc Crawford's grade through 1/16th of the season? A-, with potential for A+ if he can somehow shore up that godawful penalty kill. Five-on-five, this team blows away the competition (no player is worse than -1, and the team is 20th in the NHL in penalty minutes, both huge contrasts to last season's catastrophic start). Tune in next week when I detail the results of my time-traveling expedition to July 2008, where I wrest control of the phone from Voltron GM Hulkson as he makes the call to Sean Avery's agent, thereby preventing the bloodless apocalypse foretold by the Mayan calendar -- Hull's superhuman grip on his Blackberry may surprise you.