Montreal Canadiens: You'd like to think they can beat Toronto
by Hawerchuk on Mar 20, 2010 10:53 PM EDT
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PrintMontreal and Toronto played the 5th game of their six-game season series tonight. Montreal was not able to win any of these games in regulation, losing one and going to OT four times, but luckily coming out with seven points in the standings. Indeed, Montreal was thoroughly outshot over these five games, making those a very lucky seven points:
| SF | SA | PCT TOI | TOI | GF | GA | S%F | S%A | |
| tied | 167 | 194 | 51.9 | 10131 | 6 | 5 | 3.59 | 2.58 |
| mtl down 1 | 37 | 29 | 10.9 | 2123 | 4 | 1 | 10.81 | 3.45 |
| mtl down 2 | 11 | 15 | 4.3 | 842 | 0 | 1 | 0.00 | 6.67 |
| mtl down 3 | 33 | 33 | 10.2 | 1987 | 0 | 0 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| tor down 1 | 32 | 45 | 10.6 | 2063 | 3 | 3 | 9.38 | 6.67 |
| tor down 2 | 27 | 59 | 12.1 | 2365 | 0 | 3 | 0.00 | 5.08 |
| ot | 19 | 16 | 921 | 2 | 0 | 10.53 | 0.00 | |
| tied/reg | 148 | 178 | 9210 | 4 | 5 | 2.70 | 2.81 | |
| total | 307 | 375 | 100 | 19511 | 13 | 13 | 4.23 | 3.47 |
Toronto is a bad team, and yet Montreal didn't really even play them to a draw, relying on Toronto's execrable goaltending to bail them out. If I was looking at New Jersey, Pittsburgh or Buffalo in the first round of the playoffs, I'd want to know that my team could mop the floor with the Leafs.
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Of course, you’ve proven many times that Toronto is a high possession team that can’t score and can’t stop pucks. So what does this excercise accomplish for Montreal’s prospects against other teams? What Toronto does to Montreal is what they do in general.
Shots were 33-27 Toronto tonight (30-25 in regulation), but penalties were 6 minors for Toronto and 1 for Montreal. Seems like Toronto’s puck possession 5 on 5 wasn’t a huge advantage. Toronto’s lucky their weak PK stood up well against Montreal’s strong PP.
Montreal were admittedly awful for a lot of the year and got lucky points wise to stay in the playoff race. But they’re a better team now than they have been all year, basically as soon as their D got healthy and added a good 3rd line centre (imagine that). Montreal’s not a Cup contender, but they’re playing like a playoff team now. Things change so much through a season that it’s tough to say how well a team will match up at a particular moment in time. In the playoffs, we know how things should go on average, but in a limited two week sample, it’s all a guess anyways.
Hockey blogging can't get any flatter.
Luck may have less to do with the PK tonight than you'd think.
I don’t have the numbers, but since the trade deadline, we’ve been quite good on the PK, and awful on the PP. Although I wouldn’t call any of our goals tonight particularly lucky, I found it more surprising that our PP was 1/1 than the fact that our PK was 5/6.
"Defense! Defense! Common! Do you call that blowing!?"
Looking at the scoring chances I recorded, at ES, TO barely outchanced the habs 17 to 16 on October 6 (Leafs attepted 77 shots to Mtl’s 53), then 15-12 on October 31. In december, an awful, awful month for the habs, Leafs outchanced the habs 15-9 (60 Shots attempts to 50) on the first and 26 to 8 on the 27th (82 Shots to 36!).
Tonight, I have the Habs at 16 and the Leafs at 15 at ES, 24 to 18 overall, with attempted shots 55 Leafs vs 50 Habs at ES. Haven’t run the crosstabs, but the differential seems to be Moore and Plekanec getting eaten alive by Grabovski, which tells me Pleks is playing hurt.
Even with the Canadiens playing better lately, is there anyone they can match up with in the playoffs that won’t kill them? Washington, they’ve played surprisingly close in some high-scoring games, but they’re winless against Buffalo, 1-3 against Pittsburgh, and probably haven’t had a winning record against Jersey since Patrick Roy’s heyday.
I dunno, I just can’t get too excited about their prospects, from the games I’ve watched, and from their record against the East’s best. They’ve shown flashes of brilliance, and if they get one of those flashes, I guess they might be able to do something, but realistically, I bet whomever they get makes short work of them.
SNN Sports - A theoretical Oilers blog (i.e. theoretically, I write stuff there). Link now 100% less broken.
Agreed. I think their five games against the Leafs show their serious downside and potential for playoff disaster.
Mostly, I just look at the teams I figure they can reliably beat, and they’re all right there around them in the standings. If Buffalo suffers an epic fail and Montreal miraculously takes the NE, now we’re talking, but that seems highly unlikely.
SNN Sports - A theoretical Oilers blog (i.e. theoretically, I write stuff there). Link now 100% less broken.
While I completely agree with you that Montreal’s prospects against Buffalo, Pittsburgh or New Jersey would be lamentable, I don’t see that the Toronto game stats are convincing in that regard. The games were, in effect, tied, despite the fact that Toronto outshot them convincingly. Usually, Toronto outshoots teams convincingly and loses. Given the very small sample of 5 games, I think this shows nothing other than Montreal is a marginally below league average team, which is probably what they are.
Well, the argument was that Markov took Montreal from being a .450 team to a .550 team or something like that, but it didn’t show up in the shot totals. At least I don’t think it did.
Without Markov: 14-20-3; 8 wins via OT/SO.
With Markov: 22-9-4; 7 wins via OT/SO.
So, regulation records: 6-20-11 without Markov, 15-9-11 with him.
Yeah, no great swing caused by Markov at all.
Hockey blogging can't get any flatter.
Show me the shot totals though. Surely you know that no defenseman is worth 11.5 wins per season. That would put Markov’s value at $25M.
You see, to me that pegs the value of the rest of the team at $33m, which seems about right. :)
I don’t have the shot totals, but one significant asterisk would be that Markov came back and put Marc-Andre Bergeron to a forward position permanently, which was a huge difference. If you could dress 21 players, Bergeron has real value.
Hockey blogging can't get any flatter.
Montreal’s Corsi % was 46.7% when he was out and 46.8% when he was in. Shots for and against went up when he was playing.
He does have value on the PP, which lets Montreal outperform its Corsi somewhat. But the big difference was goaltending, and it’s hard to credit a guy who sees shots against go up with a positive impact in that department.
Of course, according to your numbers, he is the single biggest difference maker amongst Montreal’s regulars when in the lineup. For positive impact, he always seems to come out on top: tough competition yet high save percentage.
What does it say about Markov when the best shooters in the NHL can’t score at a high clip when they go out against him?
This is where counting every shot as equal clearly shows it’s holes. Sometimes good defence is making good players take bad shots.
Hockey blogging can't get any flatter.
I don’t deny that there’s talent for these things. You can look at my back-and-forth with Vic Ferrari last summer where I argue in favor of it.
Olivier is the guy who can answer this question of whether the chances broke differently once Markov came back.
And I don’t deny there are other reasons for Montreal’s turnaround since Dec. 20 than Markov’s return (though I think it’s the top reason, how many wins is he worth is something I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten foot pole, all I know is he enables wins much easier). We’re clearly only scratching the surface about what players can contribute and what really is just random luck (which clearly is a factor). Just like there isn’t one single correct way for six people to play a game.
Goaltending is clearly one of Montreal’s true strengths. So is the power play (and penalty kill to a lesser extent). Not coincidentally, those are traditional Montreal strengths.
Comparing the 5 on 5 play in five games played over five and a half months apart and drawing conclusions from that seems ridiculous, though, especially considering the fact that Montreal has used 38 different players this season (plus 2 goalies). In three weeks, they will be using hopefully the best 18-20 of those players they have left, plus just the one goalie.
Hockey blogging can't get any flatter.
Playoff history is littered with teams that swept a season series only to be swept by the same team in the post-season. I would be very hesitant to read too much into any team’s head-to-head record with any one other team.
It’s Montreal’s mediocre overall record, combined with their mediocre personnel, that makes me pessimistic about their playoff chances. Of course, I could say the same thing about Boston or Ottawa…
I've been looking at the sky
Didn’t the early 2000s Leafs consistently lose the season series to Ottawa, only to cream them in the playoffs damned near every year?
SNN Sports - A theoretical Oilers blog (i.e. theoretically, I write stuff there). Link now 100% less broken.
Yeah, the 2001 Leafs lost all five regular season games to Ottawa (one in overtime) and then won all four playoff games in the first round. “Littered” is perhaps an overstatement when it comes to both sweeping and being swept, but there are far too many instances of teams being dominated but then winning playoff series for me to trace through them all.
One of the last things I look at when predicting a playoff series is the head-to-head regular season record. It’s a small sample size that can be easily swamped by other considerations over an 82 games schedule.
I've been looking at the sky
by Back In Black on Mar 22, 2010 10:34 AM EDT up reply actions
A team’s pythagorean winning percentage is the best indicator of its expected playoff success. And it’s also the best indicator of their success against another team during the season. The odds of a legitimately good team dominating the season series and then getting crushed in the playoffs is extraordinarily low. But I’ll find all of the cases where it’s happened and write it up.
I’ll be interested to see it – although I would certainly expect the odds of a legitimately good team getting crushed in the playoffs to be low, and I’m already relatively convinced of the merits of the Pythagorean winning percentage. It’s the head-to-head series with individual teams that I’m skeptical about. If you told me that Montreal had swept Washington this year, I still wouldn’t give them much chance in a seven game series.
I've been looking at the sky
by Back In Black on Mar 22, 2010 3:41 PM EDT up reply actions
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