Watching the Jets take on the Avalanche last night brought on some déjà vu.
The Avs putting up a dominant first period that resulted in a three-goal lead starting the second? That feels familiar.
McKinnon utilizing the rapid Colorado transition game to put space between him and the defender? Yeah, that feels like it’s happened before.
Ah, right. January 18. The Avalanche executed on the Calgary Flames in the same way. Three-goal lead after the first then two periods of lockdown hockey. Tonight we get to see if the Flames have learned anything from that experience and improved upon themselves.
Unlikely Improvement hasn’t really been evident among the 2022-23 Flames. Their best on-ice product this year was a three-game winning streak from October 13-18. The first of those games being an offensively charged 5-3 win over Colorado.
Since then, it’s been a long, dreary season. They’ve played a league-leading 35 one-goal games. Calgary has lost 22 of said one-goal games. Heading into tonight, it’s been 33 days since the team has won two in a row.
In other words, the Flames have been consistent in their inconsistency. Often the only question after a win is:
Well, do they lose the next one in overtime, shootout or regulation?
It’s not-so-simply been that kind of season — but you could argue that they have a decent chance to eke out a victory tonight. Let’s look at a few trends.
Pelletier Rising This has to be the story of the year for Calgary. With back-to-back multi-point games this week, Jakob Pelletier broke out like we all were expecting him to. His ability to corral loose pucks and execute with purpose has finally begun to translate on the scoresheet.
Even better is that three of his four points over two days were generated on the power play. Pardon me while I quote STAIND, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen a rookie take the offence on his back. It’s also been a while since Calgary has run a decent-looking power play unit.
Jakob is just scratching the surface. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching his game develop at the NHL level.
Possession Dominance Despite this constant repetition of win-loss-win-loss, the losing of one-goal games, consistently losing in overtime — you have to have some small part of you believing that Calgary has the capacity to be a contender.
After 59 games, the team sits near the top of the league in several categories. Per Natural Stat Trick:
Most Shot Attempts For: 3048 — 1st Least Shot Attempts Against: 2305 — 2nd CF%: 56.94% — 2nd xGF%: 54.96% — 2nd High Danger Chances For Percentage: 51.92% — 13th Mid Danger Chances For Percentage: 55.27% — 2nd Low Danger Chances For Percentage: 60.05% — 2nd
This all isn’t listed to put you to sleep. If you remove the Carolina Hurricanes from the list: The Flames are number one in all of the above categories with the exception of HDCF%.
This all is a bit of a buildup to one last statistic. Then I’ll shut my yap and get back to real hockey.
Luck PDO is a weird stat. First of all, the acronym doesn’t stand for anything in particular. It comes from the online handle of Brian King, the first to propose it, for forums and Counter-Strike.
If you don’t want to read the explanation, it basically accounts for a team or player’s luck. Here is Wikipedia’s explanation of what PDO is.
PDO, called SPSV% by the NHL, is the sum of a team's shooting percentage and its save percentage.[9] The sum is then multiplied by 10 and that total is the teams PDO. The sum is also used separately to see if a team should expect a regression or improvement. The combined SPSV% of all 32 NHL teams will always equal 100%. PDO is usually measured at even strength, and based on the theory that most teams will ultimately regress toward a sum of 100, is often viewed as a proxy for how lucky a team is. According to Wilson, a player or team with a PDO over 102 is "probably not as good as they seem", while a player or team below 98 likely is better than they appear. PDO can also track individual players by taking the sum of their shooting percentage and the team's save percentage and then multiplying the sum by 10.
Per Natural Stat Trick, the highest PDO this year is held by Boston, 1.036. The highest in the Western Conference is Dallas, 1.017, which also puts them in second place across the league.
Despite ranking first in the Western Conference in most advanced statistics, the Flames have the fourth-worst PDO in the NHL, 0.982.
In other words, the Calgary Flames should be putting up a better record soon — if we’re to put faith in fancy stats.
Colorado The opposition tonight is coming in hot.
4-0-0 since February 15, the Avalanche have the fourth-best offence (4.50 GF/GP) and fifth-best defence (2.25 GA/GP) across the NHL over that time. All-Star center Nathan MacKinnon has nine points over those four games and the eye test points out that their confidence in transition is going to be a challenge tonight.
They’ll be tired. They played in Winnipeg last night and flew to Colorado after the game. They’ll be starting 22-year-old Justus Annunen, who has only played one game for Colorado this season — a 4-1 victory over the Blues on February 18. The 6’4… Finn saved 19 of 20 for a .950 save percentage over the spiralling Blues.
This should be an interesting test. Colorado is missing some core pieces to injury, but they’re certainly rolling. The Flames have been goalied by several unproven goaltenders this season. They have to find a way to generate NHL-level high-danger opportunities against teams rallying around a young goalie.
Per dailyfaceoff.com:
Calgary Flames Projected Lineup Per the team.
Dube-Lindholm-Toffoli Pelletier-Kadri-Huberdeau Mangiapane-Backlund-Coleman Lucic-Lewis-Duehr Hanifin-Andersson Weegar-Tanev Zadorov-Gilbert
Markstrom Vladar
On Goaltending We’re approaching 1000 words here, so we’ll keep it short. The Avalanche are 6th in first-period goals since the beginning of their winning streak with 6 in four games. Jacob Markstrom has struggled greatly with the first few shots at the start of games. This could be over by the ten-minute mark of the first period.
Game time is 8:00 pm MST. Catch the broadcast on CBC, Sportsnet, and City in Canada. Altitude Sports in the States.
Trevor Neufeld
@Trevor_Neufeld
Stats via naturalstattrick.com and nhl.com. Graphic via dailyfaceoff.com. Will Ferrel gif sourced from learnerbly.com.