It's not too late for a post-game, is it? Surely not when head-to-head icetime data is involved... more after the jump.
General thoughts:
The Sabres and Leafs games were much the same, I thought. We weren't fantastic at EV, but we were really bad on special teams. Kiprusoff played out of his mind, and Iginla was OK.
Now for the good stuff. Attached are the head-to-head ice-time tables and faceoff zone start numbers for every player in the BUF game (020265) and the TOR game (020268). The file formats are .CSV (comma-delimited) text files. If you're a Windows user, Excel can read these. Otherwise, you can use a text editor, or another spreadsheet program.
This is basically data that Vic made available through TimeOnIce last year. I don't know if this stuff is available this year, so I've put it up for public consumption. It's a ton of data to look at. My impressions:
- Sutter's leaning on Bourque and Langkow hard in the defensive zone. That's why they had such awful Corsi numbers, I would imagine.
- Iginla still gets respect around the league. Lindy Ruff threw both Tallinder and Pominville (his tough-minute guys) against him. Wilson decided to use Grabovski though, smart call I guess as it allowed him to free up Kessel to play vs. Boyd, Moss and Nystrom.
- Bouwmeester has a pretty tough gig here in Calgary. Look at his icetime against Kessel. Then look at his zone starts.
- Calgary needs to get its shit together and start putting pucks in the offensive zone.