MAKING A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION
Upsets and OT dominate opening round
The 2017 NHL playoffs: just as we all expected — or not. In yet another repudiation of the tendency of the sports media to line up piles of experts who pick every series, favourites like the Boston Bruins, Minnesota Wild, Montreal Canadiens and — especially — the Chicago Blackhawks are now home and shaving beards that hadn’t even become shaggy yet.
With Round 2 looming, what can we expect? You will note the following includes no predictions.
FREE HOCKEY
Round 1 featured 18 overtime games, including five in the Washington-Toronto series alone. If you have been anxious for sleep — or, ahem, aware of print deadlines — and have felt like this is a crazy number, you are correct. The 18 OT games in the first round is a record, which is all the more significant because not one of the eight series went to seven games and two were sweeps. Overtime happened in 43 per cent of the 42 first-round games — it took place in about 24 per cent of regularseason games over the past decade. Before you blame tight defence or conservative play for the jump in OT in this year’s first round, note that last year just seven of 47 first-round games — 15 per cent — went to overtime, and there were 20 such games in the entire playoffs. There were 19 overtime games in the 2015 playoffs and 26 in 2014. This year’s spike is unusual, and with most weird and unusual things in hockey, it’s probably due to randomness more than anything else.
BOO, SCHEDULE
One thing that the NHL’s assorted experts did unequivocally pick accurately was the fact that the league’s relatively new playoff-bracket system would lead to a second-round matchup of two teams that didn’t deserve to face each other in the second round. With Pittsburgh having dispatched Columbus and Washington surviving Toronto, it’s now Pens-Caps in Round 2 for the second straight year. Instead of determining matchups each round based on regular season points, the NHL keeps its original brackets intact, which means Ottawa gets a wild card New York team instead of facing either of the teams that finished ahead of the Rangers in the Metro division. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that New York gets Ottawa, because they benefit from the bracket arrangement more than anyone. The Rangers (102 points) will play a 98-point Ottawa team, while Washington (118 points) and Pittsburgh (111 points) play each other. The NHL says it likes to preserve divisional rivalries in the early rounds, but no one actually cares about divisions. As I say: Boo.
THEY BE STINGY
So many things go into determining the outcome of a playoff series, and yet over and over it comes down to which goalie makes more saves. In seven of the eight first-round series, the goaltender on the winning team had a better save percentage than the one on the losing team, with the only exception San Jose’s Martin Jones over Edmonton’s Cam Talbot. And even there the difference was not exactly a chasm — less than a full percentage point. Goaltending alone explained much of the result in Nashville, where Pekka Rinne faced three more shots than Chicago’s Corey Crawford and gave up nine fewer goals, and in St. Louis, where Jake Allen faced 49 (!) more shots than Minnesota’s Devan Dubnyk and gave up two fewer goals. For Columbus’ Sergei Bobrovsky and Calgary’s Brian Elliott, we will spare the goalie-versus-goalie comparison because that would be just mean.
REVENGE OF THE EYE TEST
Those goalie performances also go a long way toward explaining why Round 1 had some rather counterintuitive advanced-stats results. The three best teams by shot attempts — your basic Corsi — were Minnesota, Columbus and Montreal, and all lost. That wasn’t a result of trailing teams firing desperately on net either, as both Minnesota and Columbus had the best shot-attempt differentials when games were close (within a goal, or tied in the third period). But facing a goalie who stops everything, as happened to Minnesota, or having a goalie who is very much not stopping everything, as happened to Columbus, will poke Corsi right in the eye.
THEY’RE NO. 1!
The biggest surprise was Nashville’s four-game dusting of Chicago, which naturally has led to many dissections of the once-mighty Blackhawks. Have they finally fallen victim to the salary cap, with not enough good depth around the core of superstars? Or is that core — Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Marian Hossa — simply too old? There is one number from their series, though, that is particularly glaring: Chicago’s five-on-five shooting percentage against Nashville was 0.9 per cent. League average is around eight per cent. Even if you round up to a nice one per cent, there was no way the Blackhawks were beating anyone when that few shots are going in, even if they still had the whole band together from their glory years.
It’s a useful lesson for Round 2: the shooting slump kills you dead.