When Ben Smith scored the overtime winner in Game 6 of that 2011 series to tie the series at 3, I remember my friends being nearly despondent. They couldn’t believe that the Canucks had blown a 3-0 series lead and had to win a Game 7. I kind of shrugged. My line was “I’ve seen them worse”. I meant the Messier era, or at least I thought I did. Anyway, it’s worse.
First, a preamble on what is controlled from the manager’s booth:
A belief I have is that it shouldn’t take a PhD or much knowledge in coding to make a dent in the hockey analytics landscape. All one needs is a testable idea, an Internet connection, a subscription to the NHL games package, and time to commit to seeing it through to the end.
It just so happens that Eric Tulsky has all of the above. Tulsky was a pioneer in the hockey analysis landscape, back when the landscape consisted of people in their underwear emailing ideas back and forth to each other. Some great ideas about this sport that are fundamental to understanding the game came out of that time: Why we use shot attempts instead of goals. Why we expected shooting and save percentages to regress. Why starting in the offensive zone is an advantage for attacking players.
Tulsky used that early knowledge and, with an army of trackers, co-authored a paper for the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (back when THAT conference was about ideas) about zone entries. You can read it here, if you haven’t yet. Basically, Tulsky et. al determined, through thousands of person-hours watching hockey, that entering the offensive zone with control leads to more offence than dumping it in. It’s a simple concept, yet wasn’t really proven until March of 2013.
Eric went on to become an analyst for the Carolina Hurricanes, and then an assistant General Manager. You might think that, thanks to his influence, the Carolina Hurricanes would enter the offensive zone with control often, especially given the amount of talented offensive players they have like Martin Necas, Andrei Svechnikov, and Sebastian Aho.
You’d be wrong. There might be 31 hockey teams that play the sport a certain way, and the Hurricanes just take everything we think we know about hockey and flip it. Their M.O. is to fire the puck as high and far down the ice as they can and race onto it. They are relentless and aggressive in getting the puck back (perhaps too aggressive. Since Rod Brind’Amour was hired as their coach, they’ve been shorthanded 957 times, more than any other team in the NHL. Despite this, their shorthanded goal differential is better than any other team over that span except for the Islanders, who have been shorthanded about 200 fewer times). They don’t show mercy.
You might find it odd, that a team partially put together by Tulsky would forego puck possession like this. But it works, and the success of the Hurricanes over recent seasons has had me re-thinking a lot of what I know about this sport. There is value in things like forechecking and aggressive backchecking and speed. You just need to know to look in the right places. Maybe Tulsky has, maybe he hasn’t, and he and Brind’Amour are just in different universes when discussing optimal hockey strategies. The analyst in the front office doesn’t get to dictate what happens on the ice.
Second, you’d think the style the Hurricanes play would be very difficult on the Canucks at their current capacity. With Hughes injured, the Canucks have no reliable puck moving D with considerable NHL experience. The recipe for the Canes was simple: move the puck early, get on the forecheck, and force those D into making bad plays. Only that didn’t happen. It wasn’t until the 3rd period that the Canes really started playing like the Canes, bolded and in italics. They let the Canucks kind of hang around, playing their game but letting the Canucks move the puck a bit more freely than I’ve seen. Eventually they locked it down.
I thought the Canucks looked reasonably good in the first two periods, despite the shot clock. Being awake late into the night can lead you to believe a lot of weird things, like I believe I will be somewhat coherent when I get a phone call to discuss this game at 10am. That’s in only a few hours. Better get to the numbers.
5v5 shots and scoring chances
Okay, we all saw it. The Canucks were relentlessly out-shot and out-chanced. Even in the third period, an environment where a trailing team at least should be able to control the territorial play, I had the Canucks out-attempted 25-7.
Where was the difference made?
Carolina really just took Vancouver to the woodshed in all situations. They had a healthy advantage in rush shots, transition shots, forecheck shots, faceoff shots, and cycle shots. About the only saving grace for the Canucks was that they were generally able to turn whatever shots they did have into reasonable scoring chances, but those shots came few and far between.
Individual numbers:
Vancouver:
- Two features of the Canes defence is their ability to prevent passes from being completed in the offensive zone, meaning that most scoring chances have to be set up by the shooter. These players are fast (especially #71) and there always seems to be a stick in the wrong spot when you’re trying to create offence against this team. The Canucks had just 3 5v5 scoring chances set up by a pass.
- Another thing the Canes do is get their sticks up close to the shooter and prevent them from getting their “A” shot away. With the caveat that my numbers might be biased because I’m actively looking for it, I had the Canes get their stick nearby and affect 24 of Vancouver’s 34 shot attempts, compared to Vancouver affecting 25 of Carolina’s 69 attempts.
- That’s partially due to the fact that the Canes take a lot of point shots, which are harder to close out. Still, the Canes did get to Vancouver’s point men and even forced the bad shots to be worse.
Carolina:
- The Canes had at least one player humming on each line. Kotkaniemi had an adventurous game and assisted on JT Miller’s second goal with his face, but he also generated a fair bit in the OZ, working well with Necas, who I thought looked very strong, if not like an imperfect fit for this team as he’s clearly so much better with the puck than without it.
5v5 zone entries
Controlled entries:
Here’s where I’m going to break a little from consensus on this game. The zone entry picture isn’t terrible. Sure, a minus-13 entry differential is indicative of the game (the real problem was that the attempts in the third period were 32-22 for Carolina, when the Canucks should have been the team pressing the play), but the Canucks entered the zone with control at a similar rate to the Canes, didn’t really turn the puck over much at the line. The D didn’t really activate, but given what we know about both teams, and especially knowing how the shot counter ended up, this could have been a lot worse.
Dump-ins:
Both teams recovered about 57% of their shoot-ins, with the Canes having a bit more volume. The Canes were also more efficient at turning their dump-in recoveries into scoring chances, while the Canucks failed to do so.
There are two Canucks I’d like to recognize in this section: Nils Hoglander forced 5 turnovers and won 1 retrieval race to win 6 pucks in the OZ for Vancouver, which is pretty good, but was only the second-best number on the team. Tanner Pearson, demoted to the fourth line, understood his assignment, and forced 7 turnovers, a game-high. This was Pearson’s best game: he looked fast, he looked strong, and he was physical. He played the way I expected the Hurricanes forecheckers to play.
Vancouver:
- “Whichever line has Pettersson” has been the best line the Canucks have had since the Washington game, and for good reason. Even though that line really failed to generate much in the way of scoring chances, they were getting the puck to the right end, with Pettersson having a particularly strong game.
- After a wild game against Buffalo, Tyler Myers slowed it down a bit, reducing his number of controlled entries from 4 to 0, the only Canuck D without a controlled entry.
Carolina:
- Like the Canucks, the Canes didn’t really move the puck on D, with the exception of Skjei, with 3 controlled entries leading to 3 scoring chances.
Entry defence
Vancouver:
- Carolina prefers to dump the puck in, so these numbers aren’t at all telling from tonight. Schenn had a concerning night, allowing 6 controlled entries with 7 chances resulting from them.
- Ekman-Larsson and Myers just are getting overmatched, as well. They each gave up 10 controlled entries last game, and on Monday, failed to force a single failed entry.
Carolina:
- Skjei was the Canes most active D on offence, and also the one the Canucks were most able to take advantage of, even if they generated very few chances 5v5. This shouldn’t be a concerning night for Skjei, he just seemed to be targeted a lot.
5v5 DZ touches and zone exits
I have to say, I was expecting some gaudier turnover numbers for the Canucks D here. Carolina’s forecheck pressure did prevent Canucks forwards from exiting the DZ with control often, something the team has been reasonably good at this season.
Still, the third period is very telling. After the Canucks D got away with just an 8% turnover percentage through the first two, it was 16% in the third. The Canucks also exited with control as a team just 35% of the time. There were stretches where all the Canucks were able to do was get the puck in the neutral zone and dump-and-change, almost as if they were playing with the lead.
Vancouver:
- Myers had an excellent night here, carrying the load out of the DZ if he wasn’t active at all offensively. He also commit just 1 turnover on 12 touches, so didn’t really fall victim to Carolina’s forecheck.
- Neither did Guillaume Brisebois, in his first game. He kept it simple, mainly deferring to his forwards on exits, but when called upon, he got the puck out with control and didn’t make any turnovers.
- Brisebois hasn’t been around QUITE long enough for him to have been in the organization when I was last a Canucks blogger, but he HAS been around long enough for me to double-check whether he’d been drafted in 2014 or 2015.
- Up front, we see tough nights for a lot of players. This is really an aspect of the game that should be a strength for Mikheyev: he has the ability to pick up the puck in the middle of the DZ and turn on the jets, getting the puck to the right end of the ice. I haven’t seen him break away in his games with the Canucks so far. He hasn’t done the things he did routinely as a Leaf, like this goal against Carolina last season. He just hasn’t gotten a chance to turn on the burners.
Carolina:
- Again, not much to glean from this since the Hurricanes seem to make it a point of pride to successfully play a brand of hockey that renders all the numbers in this post obsolete. The Canucks forced a lot of turnovers this game, a lot of them were Skjei’s, and that’s about 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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