It was the Ottawa Senators who will strike first in the Eastern Conference Finals. They defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins by a score of 2-1 after a short overtime session.
The first game of this series played out a lot like some of the games in the Columbus series. Pittsburgh was really bad territorially, but still able to generate some scoring chances. The two biggest differences were that Craig Anderson played well while Sergei Bobrovsky was terrible. The other was that Pittsburgh did not control the scoring chance or high-danger opportunities and that is going to be a problem if they continue to be awful on the whole possession thing.
Ottawa played a very good game. Actually, they played a great game.
The above chart was created by Micah Blake McCurdy (@ineffectivemath). These charts are free at his Hockey Viz website after 2PM Atlantic time.
This is objectively bad for Pittsburgh. It's one thing to hope for PDO to carry you against the top seed in the conference. It's another to allow the Ottawa Senators to dictate play like what you see above.
This once again falls on the defense and if we're going to be honest the coaching staff as well. There's a big elephant in the room that nobody seems willing to talk about and that is the unwillingness to break apart one of the worst Penguins defense pairings in recent memory and that is the Dumoulin-Hainsey pairing. This pairing gets loads of minutes and none of them have been successful, like at all.
This pairing leads the entire postseason in ice time according to Corsica with 200 minutes played. Out of the 40 pairings in the playoffs who have played 50 minutes together they rank 39th with a CF% of 40.83. The only pairing worse was the dumpster fire we know as Maatta-Daley at 40.23%. It's no wonder the Penguins can't get anything done on the possession front. The coaching staff is willingly bashing their head into a wall every time they put Dumoulin-Hainsey over the boards. It's not working and it needs to be stopped.
For perspective a Doug Murray/Matt Niskanen pairing was 43.86% in 2012-13 and Murray's personal CF% was 42.9 during that run. Hainsey's is 38.81%. I mean c'mon. How can anybody looking at this information want to keep playing a guy top pairing minutes? Being good on the penalty kill does not offset getting slaughtered at even-strength. It never has and it never will despite coaches still awarding playing time based on it. At least Dan Bylsma had the sense to not play Doug Murray in a top pairing role. Ron Hainsey's acquisition for a second round pick was dubious on the value front on the day it was made, but if you kept him in an appropriate role (bottom pairing/PK) he would probably be serviceable. The coaching staff is doing a disservice to Hainsey. I don't blame the player here. He can't handle the role. No evidence suggested that he would be able to handle such a role. Yet, there he is every night playing top pairing minutes and getting destroyed.
Shot attempt metrics matter because of the high amount of luck there is in the sport of hockey. You can't get lucky bounces if you aren't the team getting pucks to the net and right now Pittsburgh is only getting 42.04% of them at even-strength, the lowest among all playoff teams. Out of the 160 playoff teams since the 2008 Stanley Cup Playoffs this current Penguins team ranks 156th. They are fortunate to be in the Eastern Conference Finals, but they are there, and could attempt to correct this issue.
There aren't any options that will solve everything unless Kris Letang magically comes back (he's not), but doing a better job with defensive pairings and usage is something that needs to happen and it needed to happen yesterday. Pittsburgh traded for Ron Hainsey back in February, but they also traded for another defenseman, Mark Streit. He has flaws, but his passing is better than what the Penguins are currently getting. I would also argue those flaws aren't any worse than what I'm seeing from the current product. The forwards need help. Help them. At this point you have three pairings that can't hit the 45% barrier in possession. It's time to load up a pairing and play them more than the other two.
Brian Dumoulin and Justin Schultz are the two most capable Penguins defensemen in transition. They need to play together. If the Penguins do load up it really doesn't matter what the fall out is on the other pairings because it really can't get much worse than it has been. For example
Dumoulin-Schultz Maatta-Streit Cole-Ruhwedel
Do whatever with the bottom two pairings. Change them throughout the game if you want. Just play the top pairing 25 minutes or more. It's the only way for this grouping to move the needle at this point.
Marc-Andre Fleury was excellent last night. A save percentage of .943 is great. The majority of times you get goaltending like that you should win. Problem was the other guy was .964 and his team had more looks.
Evgeni Malkin has now surpassed Jaromir Jagr for sole possession of third place on the #Pens all-time playoff points list with 148. 👠pic.twitter.com/nYKHivW4kH
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) May 14, 2017
It's a great thing seeing players passing Jaromir Jagr on these lists. It speaks to how fun the Sid/Geno era has been.
So Game 1 didn't go the way Pittsburgh wanted it to. They were outplayed and out chanced, yet only lost by a single goal via overtime. If the team is willing to correct some of the obviously glaring player usage mistakes this could be a small bump on their path to the Stanley Cup Final. If they keep going with the same approach which has plenty of evidence not working then these bumps will eventually destroy the suspension and the Penguins will be watching the Senators drive on by.
Thanks for reading!