Canucks beat Ducks 5-2, Fowl play is suspected…

Vancouver waltzed into Anaheim, played one of the worst teams in hockey, and waltzed out rather easily with two points. They got a bit of flashy goaltending and had to compete for eyes with a brilliant Alamo Bowl game which featured about eleventy touchdowns, but overall it was a fine performance. The Sedins capitalized on their chances and they will be talked about in depth tomorrow, but more things happened in this game.

If you follow, click after the jump for the Statistical Three Stars, and Scoring Chance data…

-The scoring chances were at 17-15 for Anaheim, which isn’t surprising considering the Canucks held the scoreboard all game.

-Towards the end of the second period, John Shorthouse, in a a common moment of bad sense, posited the question to his audience, as to what would happen to Anaheim if the Canucks out-shot the Ducks 22-2 like they had in the third period the last time the teams hooked up at the Duck Pond. I don’t know how a supposedly reputable media network like Rogers Sportsnet employs people who can’t bother to look into a concept so simple as “score effects”.

–UPDATE: Apparently I was too hard on Shorthouse. He told the world that the Ducks would need a 22-2 shot outing to get back into the game. I am aware that he proceeded to completely ignore the score effects.

-“Score effects”, as alluded to above, is the idea, well, not so much an idea so much as it is a fact, that a team that is losing will get more shots, scoring chances and goals than the team that is winning. Anaheim was winning 4-0 into the third period the last time these two teams hooked up, and the Canucks made it 4-3. Then the Canucks, up 4-0, let the Ducks sneak back into the game and made it 4-2.

-However the Canucks are usually better than that. The team is very good at shutting down all events when they’re up by a bunch of goals, but this didn’t happen tonight. A couple of lucky bounces, and Anaheim could have been back in it much sooner. Bobby Ryan’s shot right off the crossbar and off Schneider’s back is a clear indicator of one that should have gone in but didn’t. (By the way, I talk often about Kevin Bieksa’s PDO and his regression to the mean in regards to on-ice save percentage. He was on the ice for this event, and instead of it going down as a “goal against”, he finishes as an “even”. Dan Hamhuis finished at a plus-one. And yet for some reason, media hacks continue to propagate this rumour that plus/minus isn’t a fluke statistic.

-Weird, every single goal was a scoring chance tonight. Usually that isn’t the case, but, heh, there you go.

-I thought that the Canucks penalty kill looked bad tonight, but after looking at the data, its not only clear that they were pretty effective, but they also somehow WON the scoring chance battle down a man, getting four shorthanded chances.

-In regards to the above point, Anaheim are an awful team.

-Maxim Lapierre was somehow kind of good tonight. He’s usually an effective, low-event player who makes sure that his line mates don’t screw up too much, but he was controlling the shot clock while he was on the ice and even set up Manny Malhotra for a pretty decent chance later in the third period. You will notice his appearance on the statistical three stars.

-Cory Schneider was good. Vancouver is getting such good goaltending lately it’s ridiculous. He kept the Canucks in it early with a couple of big stops and let the team run away with goals, not letting anything in until the game was no longer in doubt. He does not get a statistical three star tonight, however. Weird.

-Oh, but Jonas Hiller was awful. Awful awful awful. He only made 4 saves on 15 shots, and only made a single stop on a Canuck shot (of five he faced) that was recorded as a scoring chance on net. Sing it with me… “hello hello, I’m at a place called Vertigoooo…”

1 – Sami Salo (4:36 of shorthanded time without surrendering a chance, +3 defensive zone starts)

2 – Maxim Lapierre (3 chances against, despite starting in the defensive zone 11 times)

3 – Andrew Alberts (The formula may be flawed, but he was actually +2 and was strong on the PK)