The Statsies: Kiefer Sherwood tallies Canucks’ best xGF in shootout win vs. Blues
Talk about gutting it out.
The banged-up Vancouver Canucks headed on the road and clawed their way to a 4-3 shootout win against the St. Louis Blues. Was it the prettiest win? Absolutely not. But it was an important victory nonetheless, as the team showed some pretty serious resilience to outlast their opposition, especially against a pretty intense 3rd period surge. Ideally, their injury luck gets a little bit better than how it’s been going, but the Canucks are winning in spite of this and that should be admired.
Here’s the win, by the numbers.
As always, you can find our glossary guide of advanced stats here.
Game Flow
For the first two periods, this game very much hung in the balance. Neither the Canucks nor the Blues could really separate themselves from each other in the Corsi department or expected goals, reflected not only on the scoresheet but also in the game flow chart above. That balance was broken in the third, especially in the last couple of minutes, where the Canucks probably started to run out of gas, being down Brock Boeser since early in the contest. The Blues racked up a 74.16 xGF% share with a 6-1 edge in high-danger chances in that final frame, but fortunately Vancouver was able to hold strong to send this game into extras.
Heat Map
The heat map isn’t anything tremendously impressive from either team. Overall, there weren’t a lot of scoring chances to speak of at 5v5 play, with the Blues holding a narrow 20-18 edge on that front. In terms of high-danger chances, St. Louis owned a 10-7 lead. But as shown on the heat map, that difference didn’t really add a whole lot to their hot spot in relation to the Canucks. A low-key game isn’t the worst thing in the entire world, given the kind of personnel that Vancouver has been forced to call up and ice.
Individual Advanced Stats
Corsi Champ: Pierre-Olivier Joseph being forced into regular minutes this early into the season is not ideal, but the defenceman has been stepping up to hold down the fort. He led the team last night with a 70.37 CF% while being thrown out against a good chunk of the Blues’ middle 6. It was some solid work especially being thrust up into a bigger role in the lineup, playing against better opposition than he’s probably used to.
Corsi Chump: Mackenzie MacEachren’s Canuck debut wasn’t something to write home about. His 27.78 CF% brought up the rear of the pack, on ice for a 2-7 hole in shots and a second-worst 23.08 xGF%. MacEachren did get slightly sewered by his deployment, with zero of his shifts or faceoff starts coming in the offensive zone. Again, considering the kind of player and situation that he’s being played in, the context makes these numbers slightly more forgiveable.
xGF: PO Joseph led the Canucks in this category too, tallying up a 68.12 xGF% and holding a solid 9-3 scoring chance edge and 3-1 high-danger chance advantage as well. Again, it wasn’t anything spectacular, but for a 7th-defenceman asked to play regularly in the lineup, the results are anything but the worst. Of course, the main attraction was
GSAx: Kevin Lankinen did enough to get the Canucks across the finish line in this one. With the Blues racking up 3.64 xGF across the entire game in all situations, the Finn put in a bounce-back performance to post a 0.64 GSAx. The three goals that got past him were evenly distributed through high, middle, and low danger, which isn’t the worst thing in the entire world. It was nice to see Lankinen finish in the positives as well, given how his last two starts went.
Statistical Musings
Working his way up: Tom Willander’s second game in the NHL went pretty darn solid. The young Swede saw himself elevated to second-pairing minutes, playing the third most amount of minutes amongst all defencemen and recording some pretty darn good stats. While his 40.00 CF% was -10.00 CF% rel to team average, Willander kept things tidy in his own end, a 43.95 xGF% giving him a slight 4.15 xGF% rel to team average. Essentially, the rookie held his own, performing just above team average when it came to expected goals share at both ends of the ice. Willander nearly split high-danger chances too, sitting at 3-4 from last night. Not bad for being put into the position that he has been.
Eventually for Evander?: Much has been made of Evander Kane’s lack of production thus far into the season, which is absolutely fair. For how much he is making, the winger has been underperforming in terms of points scored. That being said, last night he did do plenty of good things, posting the team’s second-best CF% at 68.18 and the 4th-best xGF% at 55.16. Something has got to break eventually, and with how depleted this lineup is, hopefully it’s soon that Kane starts producing.
As a team
CF% – 42.86% HDCF% – 38.89% xGF% – 38.62%
The Canucks weren’t the greatest offensively besides Kiefer Sherwood, but they were decent enough defensively to keep the Blues at bay. That was all they really needed last night fortunately, and they were able to ride out a late surge from the Blues to push this into overtime. Then, that was all that Lankinen needed to secure the result in a shootout. With the state of this lineup, the win was definitely a welcome sight and showed the depths of resilience and character on this roster.
Vancouver travels slightly north, taking on the Minnesota Wild tomorrow night.
Stats provided by naturalstattrick.com
The Last of Us Part 3 Teased, and You Probably Missed It
C'mon, Neil, tell us what you're planning already
The Creative Director behind some of Naughty Dog’s biggest games, including both The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, just randomly dropped a tease on his Instagram that is almost definitely referring to
Earlier this week, Naughty Dog and Sony celebrated their official The Last of Us Day, a yearly event in which they pump out a load of TLOU-shaped freebies and (usually) reveal what they have in the works.
Ever since they started the yearly event back in 2013, Naughty Dog has been pretty good about giving us something juicy. Even if they don’t have a huge announcement up their sleeves, we at least get some sort of cool freebie to mark the occasion.
This year, however, we got some downloadable pumpkin stencils. This is not a joke. I am being deadly serious.
There was some other stuff in there, too, don't get me wrong. Joel and Ellie-themed
Fans were noticeably let down by the whole thing, because many assumed that Naughty Dog were building up to announce The Last of Us Part III.
On one hand, that’s on them for building their expectations too high. On the other hand, Naughty Dog have remastered
However, it seems the juiciest part of The Last of Us Day wasn’t included in either Naughty Dog's or Sony’s official blog posts. Instead, it was on Neil Druckmann’s (who served as Creative Director and writer for both TLOU games) Instagram page.
“Love how the script book turned out. Lots of fond memories while flipping through the pages,” Druckmann posted on his official Instagram.
“Happy TLoU day! Can’t wait to give y’all more TLoU updates when the time is right.”
Alright, so let’s be levelheaded for a second here, because “more TLoU updates” could mean anything. It’s vague enough that, perhaps, it’s not worth getting excited about, right?
Personally, however… I think Druckmann is smart enough to know that the internet is only going to interpret that one way. This is his way of saying that Naughty Dog is currently very busy working on their next game,
Maybe I’m just huffing on copium, but I think it’s telling that he chose to say this directly after the internet reacted poorly to what was featured in The Last of Us Day. He just doesn’t want to pull an
