Oh no, they did it again.
I want to make two points before going into the statistics:
First, sports are much stupider that you can imagine. It isn’t enough for the Canucks to lose 3 straight games to start the season. Had you told somebody that was going to happen before the season started, you would have been regarded as a downer. The way the Canucks have lost these games is much stupider than an already negative outcome. They’ve blown a 3-goal lead, a 2-goal lead, and a 2-goal lead and have lost every game in regulation. They have spent 50% of their 5v5 time leading, the highest percentage of any team that has failed to win two games. They haven’t even been bad at 5v5 while trailing, nearly all the damage has been on special teams: they’ve allowed 4 powerplay goals against when leading, and 2 shorthanded goals. It’s difficult to win when your special teams are that bad.
Second, the decision to challenge the 6-4 goal. It was very clearly onside as Jensen had full possession of the puck. However, with 2:58 left, there was enough doubt that the situation room could have found a way to void the goal and avoid going down by 2. It was worth a shot, and probably at a point where you only had to be about 5% sure that the call would be reversed to break even. I saw some people critical of the challenge on Twitter as it happened, but I couldn’t agree with them. I wouldn’t have challenged that call in a closer game, but the odds of the Canucks scoring 2 goals at that point in the game were practically zero. Bruce Boudreau made an attempt to win the game, not to lose by less.
OK, onto the numbers. I’m mixing up the order a little bit here.
5v5 team stats
Shots and scoring chances
Somebody might have told the Canucks that they weren’t getting enough offence from the defencemen and I think that advice was taken a bit too literally. 23 shot attempts from the defensive group, with just 1 recorded as a scoring chance.
While the forwards outside the JT Miller line have been fine, generally, a big issue so far this season is that the opposition D has out-chanced the Canucks D by a significant margin. Needing offence from the back-end is forcing Boudreau to overuse Quinn Hughes, and while he looked good on balance, he had some plays in the 3rd period that just looked like a player already run down in game 3. Specifically, I’m thinking of a play where Alexei Protas walked out to the net from the left corner, with Hughes guarding that side of the net, offered no resistance as Protas got a good shot from right in close on Demko. And even with Hughes being overused, the Canucks D are still generating a whole lot of nothing.
Let’s see how this broke down individually:
Vancouver:
- Hughes had the only scoring chance among the Vancouver defence. Another issue? The Canucks D also didn’t set up any scoring chances, in addition to setting up just 2 total shot attempts at 5v5 (comparatively, the Caps D set up 9 shots and 4 chances, including the winning goal). Ekman-Larsson and Burroughs took some long attempts that had no chance of going in.
- In fact, there were only three scoring chances set up for the Canucks all night, each of them coming from the third line. That basically forced everybody on the team to create their own shots, and while Podkolzin and Pettersson were both able to do so, no other Canucks were.
- Simply put, the Canucks lost this game for a lot of reasons, but their inability to move around the OZ and get inside was probably the biggest one. The Capitals seemed content to just let the Canucks cycle the puck on the outside. You aren’t making life difficult for goalies if they get time to adjust to every shot.
Washington:
- There was a bit more cohesiveness to the Capitals attack today than Vancouver’s, and they had several players show up, namely Ovechkin (who?) and Kuznetsov (who probably shouldn’t have been in the game after that slash to Burroughs’ face at the end of the second period).
Zone Entries
It shouldn’t be a shock that the Canucks were out-gunned in entries again, spending more time leading than trailing. The Capitals are not a team that likes to carry the puck in, if they can avoid it, and there were some ugly, ugly sequences where the two teams were just firing pucks at the other in the neutral zone, and if the puck happened to get by a body, one player might run in and try to grab it.
The Capitals were slightly better at this game, recovering 51% of their dump-ins to Vancouver’s 38%. There were some retrieval races where the Canucks D going back for the puck just looked slow and uninterested in engaging physically, namely Oliver Ekman-Larsson who had some DZ sequences that would have driven me mad as a coach.
And how did this break down individually?
Vancouver:
- Nice to see a bit more green on the Canucks individual chart, compared to that game against Philly. The new lines did allow the Canucks forwards a lot of space, both on entries and exits (we’ll see that below) and they had several players with big games.
- Pettersson, in particular, skated very well. He was definitely the Canucks best forward, entering the Washington zone 5 times (all with control) and creating his own shots.
- This was also probably Hughes’ strongest area of the game as well. Even at the end of long shifts, he kept his head up and made some nice outlet passes. The problem was, while the Canucks were able to find the blueline, they were not able to generate much with it.
Washington:
- The story of the game here is the Canucks’ inability to defend Kuznetsov, who entered the OZ 6 times on 8 attempts. Once inside the line, he was also able to set up some scoring chances in addition to hemming the Canucks in their zone. He had a game-high 67% corsi, per Natural Stat Trick.
- Who is the best offensive defenceman on Washington? I bet you said it was John Carlson, but I think you’d be wrong. On pure ability to move the puck zone-to-zone, I think Orlov is stronger. He was definitely a lot more active in this regard and was way more noticeable than he was last week when I watched the Capitals play the Leafs. So was Jensen. The Canucks had trouble handling WSH’s 2nd pairing.
Entry defence
Vancouver:
- I don’t think I would read too much into the fact that Juulsen forced 5 failed entries. All of them came in the first period, and 4 of them were bad shoot-ins where Juulsen happened to have hit them. I don’t think he was able to turn any of those plays into counter-attacks.
- That said, Juulsen did allow just 3 controlled entries against on the 7 entries targeting him that weren’t wayward dump-ins, though these mainly came when matched against the Caps 4th line.
- This was not Hughes’ best defensive game on the season. He played a lot, he played both sides of the ice, and he was targeted a lot. I don’t know if Hughes is strong enough defensively to effectively get the Victor Hedman treatment, and the fact the team has to turn to him so much already in the season is concerning.
- Ekman-Larsson also had a bad night defending the blueline, in addition to those puck races.
- While I liked Stillman against Philadelphia, I didn’t like him here, despite the strong entry defence number. He’s been sheltered, and is the worst Canuck D by corsi and by corsi against per 60.
Washington:
- The Canucks attacked the left side of the ice more than the right, targeting Washington’s three left D 36 times, compared to 23 targets for the right D. I don’t know if there was a pregame meeting about that sort of thing, but it’s interesting that the Canucks found a bit more ice there.
- Like Juulsen, Fehervary’s strong entry defence was a product of the type of game this was in the neutral zone. He happened to be in the way when shoot-in attempts hit him, and since I am a scientist, I have to mark those down as if he actually did something on the play. Despite this, I generally like Fehervary as a player and thought he had a strong game defensively.
Exits and DZ touches
The teams were functionally tied in controlled exit percentage, but I found it interesting that the Canucks forwards were much, much stronger than the D, who spent a lot of time dumping the puck into the neutral zone. Thankfully, their share of exits was quite low so it didn’t affect the bottom line.
And how did they stack up individually?
Vancouver:
- The Canucks forwards were mostly great, specifically Garland and Hoglander, who were 6-for-7 and 5-for-6, respectively. In addition, turnovers weren’t an issue at all for the Canucks, particularly for the forwards.
- Hughes had a tough night. While he was strong entering the zone, he missed some stretch passes coming out of his DZ, in addition to committing a game-high 4 turnovers. As mentioned above, I thought there were some moments in this game where he just looked tired. He’s giving everything out there.
Washington:
- Just a monster night for the Orlov-Jensen pairing. They did just about everything here, from setting up goals, to entering, to moving the puck out of the DZ. They matched up mainly against the Horvat line and had a secondary matchup against the Miller line, and neither group was able to sustain any kind of forecheck against them.
- Erik Gustafsson has looked way better than I suspected he would. He’s an unspectacular powerplay specialist who is undergoing a rebirth as a 3rd pair D with Washington. He formerly got 60 points for the post-dynasty Hawks, so he knows his way around the offensive zone. The Capitals also are able to create an environment he can succeed in, since they have two strong top pairs and possibly the league’s best pure checking line in Sheary-Dowd-Hathaway that they can send out to settle things down. Washington’s third pairing has a 54% corsi together this season and costs $1.75m total. That is some tidy business if they can sustain it.
Thank you for reading. I hope you found something informative in here. I’m not a huge fan of website comments, so if you have suggestions, notes on what you liked or didn’t like, kindly get at me on Twitter @camcharronyvr, or send me an email camcharron@gmail.com.
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