A Slice of Bouwmeester: Part Two

In the first installment, I had a look at Jay Bouwmeester‘s performance during his shared ice time with Jarome Iginla and Olli Jokinen over a four game stretch from October 16-28. Today, I ‘ll look at his next four games, starting with a home ice match-up against Detroit on October 31st and ending with the November 7th New York game.

One of the issues that came up in the first four games was the fact that Brent Sutter had the two forwards on separate lines. That trend held versus Detroit, but the duo were reunited for the final three games of this set

I've expanded the categories for this round. Scoring chances at EV will also be looked at, and will be shown as a +/- in terms of events, as will Corsi. I'll also show Bouwmeester's non-12/21 events in that fashion. I'll also show Bouwmeester's face-off position with and with out the pair.

Glossary notes: Sc.Ch – scoring chances, O/D F – Off./Def face off ratio, P.Opp is the number of the primary opposition player(s) faced that night. 4 w/o – Bouwmeester without either of 12/21. The rest should be easy enough.

Detroit, October 31:

As mentioned up top, the two of them were on separate lines for this one.

Iginla's overall Corsi was also -5, and Jokinen's was -3, -1 w/o number 4. 

As Kent mentioned here, the scoring chances for Iginla happened on one shift with Langkow and Bourque to close the second period. Otherwise, bupkis. Datsyuk ate the Conroy/Iggy duo.

Ice time: Boumeester played 21 minutes, with roughly 12 minutes spent behind Iggy and Joker, and was out against Datsyuk for 7.5 of Pavel's 13 minutes at EV. Jokinen spent most of his night against Draper and Helm, or Abdelkader.

Dallas, November 4th. The dynamic duo is reunited. Excellence must be at hand, no?

Iginla’s overall Corsi was -10, Jokinen was-1.

The Flames were dead lucky to win this game. Curtis McElhinney, take a bow. A few notes: Joker got his +3 Corsi on one shift with Boyd and Glencross, and if you look at the scoring chances for the game, you’d note Bouwmeester shows as +1/-8 at EV overall, but that plus was the tying goal Calgary scored with McE on the bench.

Ice time: Bouwmeester played 18 minutes at EV,  and Jokinen and Iginla spent about 10 minutes with him, most of it paired. Richards and Neal spent about 6-7 minutes of their 14-ish at EV against number 4, but as R O noted in the game comments, Crawford was moving that line around with great effect. As for the reunited duo, they didn't exactly burn it up, did they? In fairness, Iginla had two goals and an assist including the winner, so it he was certainly efficient, timely, etc. etc. Jokinen? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. 

St. Louis, November 5th. Together again.

Iginla's overall Corsi -3, Jokinen -7. There is no scoring chance data due to the absence of TV coverage that night.

So, as you might surmise, Bouwmeester hardly played behind Iginla and Jokinen, given the lack of events, and you'd be right, because of JB's 16.5 minutes at EV, only 4 of them were behind Iggy-Joker. The opposition was mixed, with Backes, Kariya, and Boyes making the bulk of his opposition, although Berglund, Perron and Eller were the main threat. The Flames had a poor second period before righting the ship in the third and winning on Phaneuf's OT effort.

New York, November 7th. 

Iginla's overall Corsi -6, Jokinen -4. Joker's +4 happened on two shifts, one with Bourque, the other with the 'Stroms.

Sutter ran a different bench in this game, with the Langkow line and the Regehr-Phaneuf duo getting the main match against Gaborik. Bouwmeester spent roughly half his 17 minutes at EV behind Iginla and Jokinen, and Corsi was much less kind to them than Kent's scoring chance compilation. When on ice together, they mostly faced the second string of Kotalik, Anisimov and Higgins. Dawes, Langkow and Bourque really carried the mail on the night.

Totals for the four games:

Total EV TOI was about 72.5 minutes, with approximately 34 spent behind 12 and/or 21. The face-off numbers struck me as a bit weird, but the Flames did have 8 more total Ozone draws during this stretch of four games, so it isn't beyond the pale, and most of that edge for these two happened when Sutter was trying to get Iginla going against Detroit.

I guess if you want to break it down this way, it looks like Bouwmeester spent about 47% of his time behind Iginla and Jokinen, with about only 41% of the Corsi events occurring in that time. Better players are usually high event, so that's maybe a sign that not much was happening with 12 and 21 out there. You'd also normally like more pluses than minuses, right?

The bigger issue for me was how things broke when all three were on the ice together. That +6/-19 happened in about 18-19 minutes of EV TOI together. As Corsi normally is expressed /60, that wolud be a rate of roughly -40. Ouch. That game against the Rangers was really symptomatic of their play, victory though it was. Sutter tried his damnedest to get the big two out against anyone but Gaborik, and they still didn’t get much going at EV.

In summation, I'm not going to put every last bit of blame on them for Bouwmeester's poor Corsi. He suffered behind the Langkow line in St. Louis as well. The big two didn't help him much, though, and they should be on the good end of possession. Between a "first" line that went through a struggle to get things going at evens and major ice-time versus the best on most evenings, Bouwmeester got a nice deep trench dug for him to try to climb out of. The fact that he does as well as he does says a lot for him. He could use some help from his friends, I'd say.

Oh, and Cory Sarich hasn’t been any hell either. That’s another tale for another time, though.

by Robert Cleave