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Statistical Summarization — CGY vs VGK

Read on if you like making yourself sad or depressed, the numbers presented here won’t do anything other than that.

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I’m here to lay out the numbers, I want it to be known that I encourage you all to love hockey for whatever reason you want, and I’m not telling you to stop enjoying those little moments that bring joy to your life. What I am about to do is tell you about a number of guys that played bad, guys that you might have watched and thought “Oh he did good tonight.” I’m telling you the numbers say otherwise, and no amount of blind logic without hard evidence presented will change my mind. 

Let’s get to the breakdown, we’re going with regular 5v5 play today (no SVA) because the already brutal numbers don’t need to look worse. Stat line is as follows: 33.33 CF%, 35.19 SCF%, 38.89 HDCF%, 34.04 xGF%. Absolutely pitiful. I will give credit to the fact that the Golden Knights are a very well built and well coached team, but this was an annihilation of sorts. 

Corsi King – One player had 50%, and he only played 2 minutes so we can’t count Noah Hanifin. Rasmus Andersson was the clear winner with a CF% of 47.22. The next two closest are a 7% drop to Elias Lindholm (40.00%) and Mark Jankowski (40.00%). Truly just, sooooo bad. Andersson is developing into a shot suppression specialist so it’s not really surprising to see him “up” there.

Corsi Clown –  Many of you are going to praise Milan Lucic (19.23%) and Dube (19.23%) for getting goals, and that’s where understanding that even though they scored those players were more of a liability to the team than a positive. Zac Rinaldo (20.00%) was inserted into the lineup, got buried badly, and did it all in just 4:45 of TOI. The 3rd of the misery trio from last night, Derek Ryan (17.65%) isn’t escaping criticism here either, he was just as bad.

Taken By Chance – Again, no Flame over 50%. I mean, how could you expect to have a positive scoring chance rate when you had the puck less than 35% of the time. Rasmus Andersson (46.67%) bless his soul for trying, led the Flames. Matthew Tkachuk (41.67%) followed in 2nd place while Mark Jankowski and Zac Rinaldo put a rate of 0% up.

On what might be the only positive thing i can find to touch on is that a few guys were alright in High danger chances. Tkachuk (54.55%), Andersson (50%), and Andrew Mangiapane (50%) were alright in that department.

xGF% – I honestly could “praise” Andersson all day (he was the best of the worst) but i’ll mention our top forward line at creating quality was 3M 2.0 Tkachuk (43.42%), Mangiapane (41.46%), and Mikael Backlund (40.13%) led for the Flames. Dube (9.62%) really does need to go somewhere to learn more about his defensive game, his overall numbers for the whole season are not good, and I don’t want the team to waste the potential this player carries.

Game Flow – 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more uniform line in one of these. That’s absolute team domination by the Golden Knights with ZERO pushback at 5v5 from the Flames.

Game Score – This is the only section where Milan Lucic (1.55) and Dillon Dube (1.05) will get any love in this review. Razz (0.48) had the best record out of any non-goal scorer. TJ Brodie (-2.25) finished second worst to a guy who had the roughest game I’ve seen him have in a long while. Mark GIordano (-2.68) was the worst, and we’ll highlight him later.

Shot Heatmap – 

VGK got lots of quality from the slot, the Flames kinda sorta shot the puck a bit from the right side of the net. These charts hopefully help put into perspective how little they did last night.

In The Crease – There’s a lot of hate on David Rittich lately, especially on Twitter. He let in 3 goals on xGA of 2.59 last night (at 5v5), which is less than ideal. The real killer is that he let a light-duty classified attempt in, those are the ones that absolutely need to be stopped. That ones on him, but I’ll defend him just a little. The performance the Flames employed last night seemed (and the numbers back it up) like that of an AHL calibre team, so any goaltender would have had a rough workload last night. All that being said I still have no clue why Cam Talbot didn’t start after his hot play of late. Geoff Ward, I have questions for you.

Player Spotlight – Mark Giordano – The Vegas Golden Knights gave the captain a rough go all night. 30.61 CF%, 37.91 xGF%, 36.67 SCF%, 45.45 HDCF%. All of it was very un-gio-like. He’s an absolute competitor and a beast of a leader, if I was a betting man (and I am) I would venture Mark Giordano is going to come out next game full of piss and vinegar ready to destroy the poor New York Islanders. Let’s hope that’s what happens.

Flashalytic’s 3 Stars – 

I would just like to clarify the only Flame deserving of proper praise from last night was Rasmus Andersson, and that’s even a slight stretch.

As twitter user Kaka (@depoisdacurva) put it last night

let’s look for a bounce back in NYI before we burn the house down.

(All stats compiled from NaturalStatTrick.com // Game Score from HockeyStatCards.com) // For all Q’s and inquiries see @Flash_33 on Twitter.

by Shane Stevenson