Statistical Summarization — CGY @ MTL

First things first, The Flames didn’t deserve to win this game. I’m gonna try and focus on some positives though because I’m hoping they aren’t defaulting into break mode 3 games early. They played a very positive 3rd period, and the game was indeed close, but it just wasn’t enough. Maybe some mixing and matching with our d-pairs could fix the possession hole, regardless let’s dive into the numbers and see what’s up. 

Corsi King – The crown for best possession metrics, for the first time this season, goes to Sean Monahan! Yay you were the best and your team scored no goals! Crap! Although, posting a 68% CF stat when your team actually hardly had the puck until the 3rd period is pretty impressive, doesn’t mean much now though. Rasmus BOOM Andersson and his 63.33% was top amongst the D core.

Corsi Clown – He barely had the puck, had a whopping 35 CA and was baaaad. 23.91% belonged to Travis Hamonic tonight. The Hanifin – Hamonic pairing has now looked atrocious more often than not and I’m wondering what we can do to fix it. Brodie is playing his best hockey with Gio right now and Razz can carry the 3rd pair with Kylington, but this pairing is such a black hole, something’s gotta give. 

Taken by Chance – When your 4 best players in SCF% is all Dmen than you can pretty much determine the forwards took the night off. You also could’ve just looked at the fact the Flames put up zero goals for a league leading 6th time, but at least we know this one wasn’t because Price played well. Oh wait that doesn’t make me feel any better. Anyways Kylington lead in % at 72.73% and Brodie had the most chances at 13, 4 more than the next Flame.

xGF% – Again the Oliver Kylington (80.53%) and Rasmus Andersson (78.54%) had a very impressive night that didn’t translate to the scoreboard. It really makes me want Flames management to go out and get a quality top-6 finisher. I know Brad Treliving doesn’t like rentals, and this years draft is so deep I’d like us to keep our own 1st round pick even if it’s in the 20’s, but something would be nice. The worst? Rather than focusing on HH pair again I’ll mention that Dube was last amongst F’s with just 24.44 xGF%. I wouldn’t be opposed to him going back to the minors for a bit and seeing what Gawdin would have to offer. The Leafs have gotten found value out of a Pierre Engvall, maybe the Flames should be more open to seeing what they have. 

Game Flow – 

As we can see here the Flames didn’t have the puck for the majority of the game, with some pushback in the third. The definition of too little too late. The “top” line of Johnny-Mony played strong and everyone else on forward kind of just showed up and skated around, put some time in.

Game Score – We have a tie in top spot for the first time. Good confidence bounce back game for David Rittich (1.43) even though he gets straddled with the loss. He’d been struggling lately and it’s good to see a solid performance. Kylington (1.43) also has had strong play of late, he’s on a nice positive run. It should be noted Hamonic and Hanifin both had bad game score performances. Like bottom 10th percentile bad. Seriously, do something Ward.

Shot Heatmap – 

The Flames got away from getting in tight for close crease chances. We can blame the Flames forwards or give the Montreal defence credit. I’m gonna blame the F’s because they’d been doing a good job at getting low and getting the puck out front before this. I don’t know how we can go from doing what we did against Edmonton to this, but we sure as hell did.

Player Spotlight – Johnny Gaudreau played a solid game last night and was snakebit. He posted Positive possession numbers, scoring chance numbers and xGF%. All around a very good game played for him, despite only 2 high danger chances. Don’t get me wrong, with the way the bottom 6 played the Flames did not deserve to win, but had Johnny G seen a little puck luck the Flames could’ve possibly stole one.

Flash’s 3 Stars – 

(All stats compiled from NaturalStatTrick.com, game score from HockeyStatCards.com)

by Shane Stevenson