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Canada's best hockey team, the Ottawa Senators, has just established a new standard of excellence. No team has ever amassed 26 points after just 14 games. To the glee of Leaf haters everywhere, the Senators set this mark against a Toronto team that was no match for anyone that night.

Let me nibble at the hand that feeds me. The media loves the hype around these kinds of moments. We have a newly manufactured milepost (14 games) so that we can tout the unprecedented nature of the instant. This 'record' is not far off others that are nothing more than a snapshot of a statistical anomaly (such as "undefeated this season in Saturday evening home games").

But it is meaningful in a way that has not been fully explained. Going 13-1 is very powerful, statistical evidence of a team that is far from ordinary. The chances of tossing a coin 14 times and getting just one tail is about 1 in 1,000 (go ahead and try it). This says that either we must consider Ottawa's start to be a very rare fluke or we must reconsider the premise that the Senators' games are a 'coin toss'.

To move the observed record of this team into the range of statistically plausible events we need to believe that Ottawa is at least a .700 team. That would still leave the Senators record as an unlikely-but-possible 1-in-20 event. As a .700 team Ottawa could be expected to amass at least 57 wins. And given the tail wind of inflated win totals due to shootout victories, a .700 team could reasonably be expected to flirt with the Detroit's 1995-96 record of 62 wins in a single season.

Have the Senators been good or just lucky?

A more reliable way of assessing team greatness is by looking at goals scored and allowed. Bill James, of baseball sabermetric fame, observed that a simple formula was highly predictive of winning percentage over the long run and sliced through short-term luck in winning games. Here is his "Pythagorean formula", translated into hockey terms:

Winning Percentage = GF2 / (GF2 + GA2)

If you plug Ottawa's 49 goals for and 27 goals against into this formula it says that the Senators ought to be flying with a .767 winning percentage, or about 11 wins in their 14 matches. While this suggests that the Senators have been a bit lucky (they did collect a shootout win), this confirms the conclusion that this is a better than .700 team.

James's formula does not anticipate a shootout to resolve ties. I have developed a more sophisticated method to address hockey's quirks that suggests that this kind of goals for/against profile would result in 22-23 points for the Senators at this stage of the season (versus the 26 points they hold today). That extrapolates to about 130 points over the entire schedule and that approaches the single season record of 132 points established by the greatest team of all time, the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens.

But take a deep breath Ottawa fans, (and, to quote Paul Maurice) it is time for some chamomile tea. Two years ago we saw a very similar run from your Senators. On November 30, 2005 Ottawa's record stood at 19 wins versus just three losses. But the Senators turned into a different team in December closing out the remainder of the season with an uninspiring 33-27 record.

This is a very, very impressive team today. But there is a harsh winter to endure between now and next May when the wins really count.