Another game, another crushing shooting performance. The shutout at the hands of Carey Price and the Canadiens comes at a time when we still hoped to get into the fight for the Eastern Conference playoffs. Obviously, we are not completely out of it, but being 7 points back is an unappealing hole to climb out of. I’m secretly hoping luck flips its switch and the pucks start going in or something, because otherwise we hardly have a chance in hell of squeaking in.
Back to the Montreal game; I thought we sucked. It was a deflating game for a lot of reasons, the most prominent for me being that we finally had powerplays to work with and we couldn't get anything (to make matters worse, we gave up a shortie). About the time I was going to chalk the entire thing up to another lame-duck effort…
Key
Vertical blue lines — Our goals
Vertical black lines — Their goals
Shaded green — Powerplays
Shaded red — Penalty kills
- …well now, what the eff is this?
- No really…<looks back at graph>…what is this?
- To think, we had some down moments, but played fairly equal at evens and actually generated some opportunities on the PP – wow. A primary example why the “eye test” can be deceiving.
- The Alexei Emelin goal looks even more inexplicable when you see it amidst a positive flurry for us…although recalling the fact that the goal largely came from an ill-timed pinch by Dustin Byfuglien…
- I am so conflicted about Bustin’…he’s what some people call a “high-event” player, creating opportunities as much as he gives them up, but I’m utterly convinced that his shot is creating additional rebounds that builds up his Corsi data. And I’m confused about how to reconcile that with his noticeable errors on D. I’m not convinced it’s a good thing to build around, but I can’t back that up with anything concrete.
