The battle of the captains would also be a good microcosm of the game. Kovalchuk spent most of the night standing around, waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting, while Iginla was battling, set up two goals, drew two penalties and had one of his strongest defensive games of the year.

As far as the powerplay goes, I’d put the third line out to start a PP one of these days.

So I saw a stat on sportsnet that I didn’t even know and wanted to look into. Ok, scary stuff here, so cover your eyes:

Miikka and the team had another slow start to the season (ha! not really). It appears that in the last 16 games (since the beginning of November) Kipper has allowed 26GA. Or a 1.63 GAA. Since the 7-1 blowout at the hands of Chi-wad he has allowed 11ga in 9 games. Or a 1.22 GAA. I know that GAA is a very team based stat, so I look at this at the post-Keenan era vs the Sutter era. We all said that it would take ~ 25 games to get them going. Read into this what you will.

I made a crude graph breaking the season into 10 game chunks. The heavy black line is GAA per 10 game peice, with the green being overall GAA during that period. Now Miikka has only played 27 games thus far, so I had to forecast a little, but at 7 goals against in 7 games…the guess for ten was easy, albeit unlikely. I’ve also included a couple of other Miikka markers…his Sutter best (1st year) and Keenan worst (last year). It may be fun to see an ev sv% graph, but that will take a lot longer. Keep in mind this is sort just for fun, has some value, but I’m not taking it too seriously.

Last game: .952% ev sv%, Highlight reel: 4-8

Game stats Kipper: 17-7-3 – .927% (.941% ev)
.920 sv% +: 17 of 26
sv% >/= opp. sv%: 20 of 26
<27 s/a: 7 of 26
>30 s/a: 10 of 26
>33 s/a: 8 of 26

Highlight reel: 100 – 79

Interesting sidebar to our previous discussion about how Sutter seems to like to pair his forwards (OlliIggy, LankBork) and mix/match thirds. I recall the discussion wondering why Sutter does this. So, I’m reading Michael Farber in SI and he was talking about the SJ Power Line and how it originally started as a pair (Thornton/Heatley) before Marleau joined because “like all coaches in the league, McLellan prefers to set up his forwards as pairs” (probably paraphrasing, don’t have exact quote in front of me).

So, is this true? Is this a league-wide thing? Am I going to have to check ice times for a number of teams to see if particular pairs play together a lot, more than particular lines? Am I going to have to figure out how to do that!! Just curious if anyone has anecdotal evidence?

Wow, I didn’t even see Armstrong threw a single punch, he just turtle his whole fight, and he DID drop the glove for the fight… can’t believe that would happens from GlenX.