The overall sentiment in the game thread during last night's game was that we dominated play, only to screw ourselves out of the win. Having put together the BW, it was pretty clear that we had, indeed, played an incredibly strong game. In the process, I ran into a little bit of a chart problem…
Key
Vertical blue lines — Our goals
Vertical black lines — Their goals
Shaded green — Powerplays
Shaded pink — Penalty Kills
- As you can see from the previous game’s BW, I had always drew up these charts to range from -20 to +20 in differential, on the premise that very few games would be so lopsided to require a greater range. I also wanted to continue to use the same template to reduce any confusion for myself and give readers a frame of reference. Welp, the honest truth is we played off the charts last game, and so to reduce the confusion I simply shifted up a value of 10 on the y-axis.
- We did a lot of things right in this game: we took advantage of our powerplay, we bent but did not break on the kill, and we played plus hockey at evens. I really can’t emphasize it enough, the mistakes made the game, and the score wasn’t reflected by the play of the skaters nor Ondrej Pavelec. It’s a small sample of how luck figures into goals and, subsequently, the final score.