Archive for April, 2010

The Montreal Canadiens will kick off their series tonight against the Pittsburgh Penguins after a stunning first round upset of the Capitals. With every division leader in the East now eliminated from the playoffs, the Penguins will have home ice through both this round and the next, assuming they make it that far.

Pittsburgh is expected to make it that far. Despite the fact that Montreal surprised the vast majority of the pundits in the first round, those pundits have overwhelmingly selected Pittsburgh as the winner of this matchup. In fact Pittsburgh’s likely the favourite to come out of the East, and if so would contend in their third consecutive Stanley Cup finals.

Montreal has already made up for an inconsistent season, but they aren’t just going to go away. They have some firepower up front, a competent defence corps and a goaltender who can win against any opponent at any time. After their first series win, one imagines they’re comfortable with the underdog role versus the Penguins.

Vital Stats/Points Of Interest: Pittsburgh

Record vs. Canadiens: 3-1
Power Play (Regular Season): 17.2% (19th in NHL)
Power Play (Playoffs): 25.0%
Penalty Kill (Regular Season): 84.1% (9th in NHL)
Penalty Kill (Playoffs): 68.2%
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Regular Season): 1.07 (9th in NHL)
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Playoffs): 1.33
The Penguins were one of the better out-shooting teams in the NHL during the regular season, ranking fourth in shots for and sixth in shots against.
Few teams in the league draw penalties as well as the Penguins, tied for third in the NHL with 326 short-handed opportunities. For those who wear tinfoil hats, the league is also rigging it so that Carolina, Dallas and Tampa Bay win by giving them tons of baseless power plays. Unfortunately for the Penguins, they also take a lot of penalties, and are now tied for fifth in the NHL in power plays faced.
No playoff team gave up more goals than the Penguins, who surrendered 235.
It’s true that Evgeni Malkin has had a disappointing season, but it hasn’t been that disappointing; over an 82-game schedule he was on pace for 94 points. He also had four goals and eight points in the Penguins’ six game win over the Senators.
The Penguins are hoping strength down the middle is the most important ingredient in NHL wins, because their three leading scorers up front are all centres: Crosby with 109 points, Malkin with 77 and Staal with 49. The flip side to this is that the wingers have been by and large a black hole offensively. Bill Guerin’s showed up and Chris Kunitz has been effective when healthy, but this is a major area of concern. In their first round series against Ottawa, Malkin and Crosby combined for nine goals – nobody else had more than Matt Cooke’s three.
The difference between Jordan Staal and Malkin is almost entirely driven by power-play work; Malkin has 46 even-strength points to Staal’s 41, but Malkin has 31 points in other situations to Staal’s eight. Of course, Staal is also sitting at plus-19 while Malkin’s a minus-6. This continued in the first round; five of Malkin’s eight points came on the power play.
Sergei Gonchar was brilliant on offence, as usual, when healthy, but had the worst plus/minus on the team at minus-4 and didn’t look as complete as he usually does. Of course, injuries may have had something to do with that; he struggled for a bit after coming back from his wrist injury in November.
I know that Marc-Andre Fleury gets cut a lot of slack in some quarters thanks to his Stanley Cup win last year (despite the fact that he played significantly better in losing the year before) but he has been, at best, mediocre this season. In the last 25 games of the regular season he allowed 3-or-more goals on 16 occasions, going 5-5-4 in those games (he was pulled twice). Had the Penguins lost their first round series against Ottawa, Fleury and his lousy 0.890 SV% would have been in the spotlight.
With Gonchar healthy, it makes sense that Pittsburgh’s power play would uptick, but it’s been an area of concern for more than a year now, despite the all-star group of players at Dan Bylsma’s disposal. Given how good Montreal’s penalty kill looked against Washington, this is cause for concern.

Vital Stats/Points of Interest: Montreal

Record vs. Penguins: 1-3
Power Play (Regular Season): 21.8% (2nd in NHL)
Power Play (Playoffs): 20.0%
Penalty Kill (Regular Season): 83.0% (12th in NHL)
Penalty Kill (Playoffs): 97.0%
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Regular Season): 0.90 (22nd in NHL)
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Playoffs): 0.76
No team in the league was awarded fewer power play opportunities in the regular season than the Canadiens; it’s a good thing their power play is so potent when it gets its opportunities.
In my preview of the Capitals/Canadiens series, I said that the most important offensive player on the Canadiens’ roster was Mike Cammalleri; he scored five goals and recorded 10 points over that seven game series and will need to repeat the performance here.
Benoit Pouliot was a revelation upon his arrival in Montreal, but he cooled off late in the season, with only one goal in his last 14 games and two points in his last 10. That has stretched over to the playoffs; he had only a single assist in seven games against Washington.
Jaroslav Halak was brilliant against Washington, but it’s interesting to note that his even-strength save percentage was only 0.925 – a number which is actually inferior to his regular season even-strength number (0.933). The reason he looked so good was he stopped all fifty shots he faced on the penalty kill – something that isn’t likely to continue.

The Bottom Line

If I really believed that the Canadiens’ won their series against Washington largely on merit, I’d pick them here. Pittsburgh’s power play isn’t as good as Washington’s, and Fleury has not looked good in net. However, I don’t think Halak’s save percentage or the Canadiens’ PK rates are sustainable, and I suspect the Penguins will dominate both five-on-five and territorially overall throughout the series. Halak might steal a couple of wins, but it’s long odds that the Cinderella Canadiens can pull off another upset. Predicted Winner: Pittsburgh.

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We’ve already established that Alexander Semin, pictured above refusing to pay the price and playing a perimeter game, had a lot of shots in the Capitals’ first round series against Montreal. In fact, he shot pucks at nearly twice his career rate.

However, I had that point countered in a discussion this morning with two other excellent hockey bloggers: J.P. of Japers Rink and Derek Zona of Copper & Blue. J.P. countered my argument by raising shot quality, arguing that Semin may have had many shots but they weren’t the same calibre of shots that he fired during the regular season. Beyond my personal opinion from watching the game, I had no data to back up my argument, so I was going to let it slide, but then Derek reminded me that the NHL keeps track of where shots are fired from on their play-by-play sheets, and Gabriel Desjardins totals them for us.

The results are interesting.

Season	Type	Goals/Gm	Shots/Gm	SH%	Shot Dist.
06-07	Season	0.494	3.16	15.6%	Unavail.
07-08	Season	0.413	2.94	14.1%	31.4’
07-08	Playoff	0.429	4.00	10.7%	34.0’
08-09	Season	0.548	3.60	15.2%	34.1’
08-09	Playoff	0.357	3.00	11.9%	32.5’
09-10	Season	0.548	3.05	15.2%	34.5’
09-10	Playoff	0.000	6.29	0.0%	32.3’

It’s interesting that we see a slight negative correlation between shot distance and shooting percentage (i.e. Semin has a better SH% from further away), which is at odds with both what we would expect and with the overall NHL pattern.

That said, if Montreal had truly managed to keep Semin to the outside, to the perimeter where he couldn’t be effective, we’d surely see that in the shot distances. Instead, we see that Semin was nearly 2.5’ closer for his average playoff shot than he was for an average regular season shot.

What I’m getting at here should be obvious: outside of Jaroslav Halak, there’s no reason to give the Canadiens team a ton of credit for keeping Semin off the scoreboard; he had plenty of opportunities, and on average they were from closer to the net than they were during the season.

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My comments on Montreal’s win over Washington on Wednesday night drew some interesting responses, including a surprising number that indicated Montreal had won the series solidly on merit. I certainly respect that Canadiens’ effort, but their decision to bunker down in the defensive zone is the decision of a team that knows it’s outmatched and needs some help from the bounces if it’s going to win.

At least, that’s my opinion, but it doesn’t seem even close to the consensus. This shouldn’t be as surprising as it is; it seems that half of the hockey world operates on the principle of waiting until one team has won the series, than going back and explaining why they won it. Winners win; had the losing team played better than the winning team they wouldn’t have lost, goes the reasoning. Unfortunately, bounces, luck and hot goaltending turns that sort of thinking on its head.

I didn’t watch every minute of Montreal/Washington, so normally I’d be hobbled trying to explain how much better the Capitals were than the Canadiens. However, fortunately for me, Olivier of the fantastic En Attendant Les Nordiques did watch every game, recorded the scoring chances, and made them a matter of public record.

(For those of you wondering about bias, if the name didn’t give it away Olivier follows the Canadiens).

Those scoring chances paint an interesting picture. For instance, Montreal won game one, despite being outchanced by the Capitals. Games five, six and seven all followed that same pattern – all Montreal victories, all games in which the Canadiens were out-chanced by the Capitals. Games two, three and four also saw the Capitals out-chance Montreal, although they did win those games.

Game	MTL Goals	MTL SC	Goals/SC	WSH Goals	WSH SC	Goals/SC
1	3	19	0.158	2	35	0.057
2	5	16	0.312	6	23	0.261
3	1	17	0.059	5	24	0.208
4	3	21	0.143	6	22	0.272
5	2	17	0.118	1	21	0.048
6	4	20	0.200	1	36	0.028
7	2	16	0.125	1	28	0.036
Series	20	126	0.159	22	189	0.116

As one can see by looking at the chart, the Capitals actually upped their game for the final two contests in the series, but it didn’t matter. They out-chanced the Canadiens by a 3:2 margin over the course of the series and actually outscored them 22-20, but Montreal was nearly 40% more likely to score on any scoring opportunity they received.

In any case, it’s very difficult to argue that the Canadiens were especially brilliant against the Capitals when one looks at that chart; after all, one can’t argue that the Habs prevented the Capitals from getting scoring chances. They just weren’t able to convert on the ones they did get.

Montreal won, and they move on, but if I were running the Capitals I don’t think I’d make sweeping changes based on this series.

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After a playoff disappointment of the magnitude just suffered by the Washington Capitals, it is perhaps inevitable that there is at least a little bit of finger pointing, and on the surface Alexander Semin would seem to be a prime target for blame.

After all, Semin – slated to earn $6.0 million next season before becoming a free agent – scored 40 goals this season, and 74 over the last two years, but couldn’t make the twine bulge even once over his team’s seven-game series with Montreal. With two assists and an even plus/minus, the forward’s offensive totals represent a disappointing drop-off from his regular season numbers.

That said, any inclination to label Semin a chronic playoff underachiever would be wrong; he had five goals in Washington’s playoff run last year and had 22 points in 21 career playoff games prior to this season’s series against Montreal.

So what happened, then? Simply put, Semin was snake-bit. I’ve put together a handy table to make this point and I’ve bolded the areas I think are especially noteworthy:

Season	Type	GP	G	A	PTS	Shots/Gm	SH%
06-07	Season	77	38	35	73	3.16	15.6
07-08	Season	63	26	16	42	2.94	14.1
07-08	Playoff	7	3	5	8	4.00	10.7
08-09	Season.	62	34	45	79	3.60	15.2
08-09	Playoff	14	5	9	14	3.00	11.9
09-10	Season	73	40	44	84	3.05	15.2
09-10	Playoff	7	0	2	2	6.29	0.0
Career	Both	355	156	168	324	3.20	13.7%

Semin’s shots per game rate in this year’s playoff series against the Canadiens was nearly double his career average; in the last three games alone he fired 24 shots at Jaroslav Halak. Unfortunately, despite that incredible quantity of shots, he wasn’t able to put in a single goal.

Others may suggest a different reason, but I’d suggest bad luck combined with exceptional goaltending by Halak is the likeliest explanation for Semin’s offensive woes. He’s a pure scorer; he’s scored in both the playoffs and regular seasons past, and his career shooting percentage is quite high. It just happened to be quite low in this series.

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Last year, it was the Dallas Stars and Edmonton Oilers who inquired about the possibility of Scott Arniel jumping to the NHL with their teams. This year, it seems that the Columbus Blue Jackets and Atlanta Thrashers are the teams most interested in the 2009 AHL Coach of the Year.

Arniel, a long-time NHL’er who spent his career with the Jets, Sabres and Bruins, just finished his fourth season as the head coach of the Vancouver Canucks AHL affiliate in Manitoba. He’ll spend the playoffs working with the Canucks, but according to the Winnipeg Free Press he’ll be interviewing with the Blue Jackets once the Canucks’ playoff run ends, and that may not be where the interviews stop. The article also names the Thrashers as having an interest, and one would expect that Arniel’s personal connection to new G.M. Rick Dudley (he played for Dudley when the latter was coaching the Sabres) will work in his favour.

Arniel won ‘Coach of the Year’ honours after guiding the Manitoba Moose to the Calder Cup finals in last year’s playoffs. He has a career 0.566 winning percentage after four seasons coaching in the AHL, all with the Moose. Prior to taking over the top job in Manitoba, Arniel was an assistant to Lindy Ruff in Buffalo, and an assistant to Randy Carlyle in Manitoba. He also spent one season as a Player-Coach with the 1995-96 Houston Aeros, working under Dave Tippett.

Arniel’s players sing his praises; asked about the possibility of him moving on to an NHL job last year, his players said he deserved it. He was described in turns as a teacher, a motivator, and a systems coach. That’s high praise for a guy who has never held an NHL head coaching job, but it goes some way towards explaining why he’s so highly regarded.

Given the amount of interest, it almost seems inevitable that Arniel will be an NHL head coach eventually; the only question is where.

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There’s been an update on the search by the Tampa Bay Lightning to replace fired general manager Brian Lawton. The Lightning have sought and been granted permission to talk to Detroit Red Wings’ executive Steve Yzerman, perhaps best known for his work managing Canada’s entry at this year’s Olympic Games/

Yzerman’s highly regarded and the fact that he now has an Olympic gold medal (plus gold and silver at the World Championships) on his managerial resume can’t hurt. He’s spent the last four years in the Red Wings’ front office, working with a management team regarded as the best in the NHL. With Ken Holland in the general manager’s chair, however, there isn’t any room for advancement within the Red Wings organization, and it makes sense that Yzerman’s opportunity would come with another team.

However, while Tampa Bay has Yzerman on the short-list, he isn’t considered to be the front-runner. That honour goes to former Canucks’ G.M. and current Maple Leafs executive Dave Nonis, who spent years apprenticing under Brian Burke before getting his chance to run a team. As G.M. of the Canucks, Nonis pulled off the trade to acquire franchise goaltender Roberto Luongo, but was reluctant to make changes to the team and was eventually fired in favour of player agent Mike Gillis. Nonis serves as Burke’s right-hand man in Toronto, and given the tragedy that befell Burke’s family has taken on increased responsibility there.

The other name which has been bouncing around for weeks is that of former Wild G.M. Doug Risebrough, who spent last season as a consultant for the Rangers. Risebrough did tremendous work early in his tenure with the Wild, and they’ve had the most playoff success of any of the recent NHL expansion teams. However, the Wild regressed in the latter years of Risebrough’s tenure.

All three men have outstanding resumes, but Yzerman’s undoubtedly the most interesting of the group simply because he’s never run an NHL franchise before. I’d be very interested to see if he brought a Detroit-style philosophy to Tampa Bay or if he chose a more conventional model for revamping the franchise.

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The first series of the second round gets underway tonight with the San Jose Sharks at home to the Detroit Red Wings. There’s a lot of great hockey to look forward to in the second round, but this might be the matchup I’m most interested in seeing.

San Jose has home ice advantage, but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of fans and pundits don’t consider them the favourites against the Red Wings. The Sharks beat Colorado in six games and outplayed them by a bigger margin then that indicates, but the fact is that until they make the Finals they aren’t going to be regarded as a team that can win in the playoffs. Fair or not, that’s just the way it is.

Detroit is an interesting comparison because for years they had much the same reputation as the Sharks have now. It’s easy to forget, given their recent success and their success in the past, but the Red Wings have had a number of early playoff disappointments and players like Pavel Datsyuk (just three goals in his first 37 playoff games) and Henrik Zetterberg (five points over his first 16 playoff games) were questioned early on. Now, their reputation is the opposite – back to back trips to the Finals have established the Wings as a ‘clutch’ team in the minds of many.

Vital Stats/Points Of Interest: San Jose

Record vs. Red Wings: 1-2-1
Power Play (Reg. Season): 21.0% (4th in NHL)
Power Play (Playoff): 19.2%
Penalty Kill (Reg. Season): 85.0% (5th in NHL)
Penaly Kill (Playoff): 86.7%
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Reg. Season): 1.23 (3rd in NHL)
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Playoff): 1.33
Aside from San Jose’s dominant top line, only one other player has a plus/minus better than plus-6: cheap off-season addition Manny Malhotra, sitting at plus-17.
The Sharks have some depth in scoring, with five 20-plus goal scorers and nine players in the double digits in goals.
The Sharks also have a plus/minus standout on defence: Marc-Edouard Vlasic, at plus-21. Only Rob Blake, at plus-14, is even close.
During the first round, the Sharks finished second in the league in shots for per game (40.8) and allowed the fewest shots against (24.8) per game – meaning they averaged 16 more shots per game than their opposition.
The Sharks won every game in the first round where they scored first, led after one period or led after two periods.
The Sharks won 53.8% of their face-offs in the first round, down from their 55.6% regular season winning percentage. Both numbers are very good.
Feisty forward Scott Nichol led the team with 28 first round hits, while Dan Boyle is the surprising leader in blocked shots, with 12. Bolye also managed six points and a plus-5 rating in round one.
The trio of Dany Heatley, Joe Thornton, and Patrick Marleau scored just one goal in the first round and finished a combined minus-7; the only forwards on the team with a negative plus/minus. Those are shocking numbers, especially given that Thornton dominated in terms of scoring chances.

Vital Stats/Points of Interest: Detroit

Record vs. Sharks: 3-0-1
Power Play (Reg. Season): 19.2% (9th in NHL)
Power Play (Playoff): 23.5%
Penalty Kill (Reg. Season): 83.9% (10th in NHL)
Penalty Kill (Playoff): 81.8%
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Reg. Season): 0.93 (21st in NHL)
5-on-5 Goal Ratio (Playoff): 1.36
The Red Wings were one of the NHL’s best out-shooting teams in the regular season, ranking second in the league in shots for and 9th in shots against, which works out on average to four more shots per game than their opposition. .
Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg remain the twin engines that drive the Red Wings’ results up front; both finished with 70 points and in the double digits in plus/minus; no other Red Wings forward topped the 45-point or plus-5 mark.
There aren’t many defencemen who record 49 points and a plus-22 rating and are still considered to be in the downswing of their careers, but Niklas Lidstrom is one of them. Over the last three playoff years he has played in 61 games, recorded 47 points and gone plus-19. It would be a mistake to underestimate how important he is to this team, or how much of a difference maker he can be, even at the age of 40.
The bottom of the Red Wings’ defence corps has been a disaster over the regular season; Rafalski and Lidstrom face the toughest opposition and are a combined plus-45, while the rest of the defence corps is a combined minus-43.
Through the first round, Niklas Lidstrom was once again the Wings’ most important defenceman (and arguably most important player) but Brad Stuart bounced back nicely from a disappointing regular season, scoring twice, adding four assists and recording a plus-6 rating in the first round. He also finished second on the team with 27 hits.
Some of the Red Wings’ depth forwards were no-shows in the first round; Kris Draper, Dan Cleary and Patrick Eaves all failed to record a point in seven games against Phoenix.

The Bottom Line

Like I said, this should be a good series. Entering their matchup with Phoenix, I said that Detroit was better than their record; they had success against good teams all season (including the Sharks) and players coming back from injury made them a better team down the stretch than they were to start the year. I like the Sharks, and I think the Sharks are sometimes underrated because of previous playoff disappointments, but I don’t like them to beat the Wings. Predicted Winner: Detroit.

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I’m in agreement with some of Kouleas’ points, and in disagreement on some others.

For starters, the idea that both teams got what they deserved bothers me a little bit. Montreal won the series, and that’s the way it is, but I felt both throughout the series and certainly in game seven that Washington was the dominant team. Montreal did a very good job in the defensive zone, but they spent such a vast quantity of time in the defensive zone that despite that good work it shouldn’t have mattered. There was a little bit of luck and a whole lot of Jaroslav Halak involved, and so they move on.

If they played this series 100 times, I’d be willing to bet we see results skewed in Washington’s favour, but that isn’t the way it works.

I don’t think Washington choked here, because I don’t know what else they could have done, but the Canadiens do deserve credit for the way they defended their zone. A lot of shots were blocked, players did a very good job of controlling the area in front of the net. Plus, Halak stopped 131 of the last 134 shots he faced.

As for the game itself, it was a lot of fun to watch. I didn’t think the officiating was terrible, although I was shocked that Ovechkin’s goal was waved off without so much as a video review. The commentators called it a “courageous” decision by referee Brad Watson, but on contact that marginal I don’t know how video review doesn’t get involved. Video review was involved later when Maxim Lapierre pushed the Capitals’ goaltender into the net on a far less questionable call; why not use it?

Pierre McGuire went on, as he does, about confident veteran big-body presences who know how to win while playing for a contract, guys who just want the puck more and are willing to take a hit to make a play, never give up on the play and get into lanes, but I don’t see the need to resort to such dubious, clichéd logic to explain what happened.

Washington dominated the territorial game, but Montreal collapsed in front of their net, got brilliant goaltending, and just enough offence to squeak out a series win. There’s nothing more, or less, to it than that.

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Yesterday, I threw a post together showing where the NHL’s best forwards this past season came from. Four out of five were first round picks, and more than three quarters were still with the team that drafted them. It was a powerful indication of the ability of NHL scouts to identify the best talent early and the importance of developing star players through the NHL Entry Draft.

Today, I’m going to look at the league’s best goalies – the 23 men who posted a 0.910 or better save percentage this season.

Original Draft Position

First Overall: 0/23 (0.0%)
Top-10 Pick: 2/23 (8.7%)
First Round: 5/23 (21.7%)
Second Round: 3/23 (13.0%)
Top 100 picks: 9/23 (39.1%)
Drafted Outside Top 100: 11/23 (47.8%)
Undrafted: 3/23 (13.0%)

How Acquired

Draft: 10/23 (43.5%)
Trade: 5/23 (21.7%)
Free Agency: 7/23 (30.4%)
Waivers: 1/23 (4.3%)

Those numbers are remarkable for how they compare to the numbers at forward. For my list of forwards, 92.0% of players were taken in the first 100 picks at the NHL entry draft, with only 8.0% slipping into the bottom of the draft or missing out entirely. For NHL goaltenders, the situation is completely different; many top goalies are never drafted, or are acquired with late picks.

Less than half of these players are still with the team that took them in the draft. One of the best (Ilya Bryzgalov) was claimed on waivers, while others joined their current teams via free agency or by way of trade. This tells us something: it tells us that the NHL, as a whole, is far worse at evaluating goaltenders than it is at evaluating forwards. This isn’t just on draft day, but also at other times – which is why good goaltenders are allowed to depart via trade or to free agency, far more often than good forwards are.

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