In the spirit of getting back to my regular life routine, I wrote a meatier game preview blog for today and even buried a bit of "state of the team" analysis in it.
Despite the wild come from behind overtime win on New Year’s Eve, the Canes should be happy to start anew in January and in 2014 after a rough 2nd half of December that saw the team go 0-3-2 before salvaging a win just before the month ended. The skid saw the team fall from 3rd place in the Metro which is of course a playoff spot to 6th which is obviously out. But the gap is only 4 points from 3rd place and 5 points from 2nd place. Per part 1 of my blog yesterday which you can find HERE, I think the Canes season gets decided between now and the Olympic break.
New Year’s Day was a big news day for Canes fans. First, the much rumored Tim Gleason trade finally became reality when it was announced that he was traded to Toronto for John-Michael Liles and prospect Dennis Robertson. Not much later, it was announced that Justin Faulk had made the United States Olympic team.
With the holidays now in the rearview mirror and the flurry of news aging in this morning’s newspaper, the Canes play for 2 points in the standings again tonight.
From the Canes side, there are a bunch of lineup changes and things still to be sorted out before 7pm tonight: --Brett Sutter rejoined the team to take the spot of injured Riley Nash who is estimated to be out 7-10 days with a lower body injury. --Cam Ward did not make the trip and is seemingly day-to-day with a lower body injury. I have not seen official word yet, but my hunch is that the team takes the leap to Anton Khudobin who had 2 decent rehab starts with Charlotte. --The team reports that Liles was at the morning skate, so all indications are that he will be in the lineup tonight. It will be interesting to see what Muller does with D pairings and healthy scratch.
As for the opponent, the Canes have fared well against the Caps this season. The good guys have won twice and arguably outplayed the Caps by an even wider margin the loss that saw Philipp Grubauer steal a game that the Canes deserved to win on December 20th. Awhile back Washington claimed 2nd place in the Metro Division and staked itself to a lead versus the jumbled bunch of divisional rivals below them, but since then the team has middle, mostly treaded water and been unable to increase their gap. With a win tonight, the Canes could move to within 4 points of the Caps in the standings. The story is very much the same for the Caps. Alexander Ovechkin continues to lead the team and keep his name in the mix for the Hart Trophy. The Caps are incredibly good on special teams with a top of the league power play and pretty good penalty killing to boot.
I think the Canes come into this game at a bit of a crossroads. Early in the season, the team was incredibly tight defensively. Offense was scarce, but the massive decrease in breakdowns and bad defensive plays enabled the team to push forward and even thrive for stretches with a non-functioning power play, power outages by key scorers, injuries and just a general inability to put the puck in the net. The formula was not what was expected, but it worked to the tune of keeping the team at or very close to #3 in the Metro Division even with schedule and injury challenges. More recently, the Canes have been much looser defensively. Even a couple of the games that garnered points (Edm OTL, Mon W) looked much more like the bad version of 2012-13 Canes hockey than something that was playoff-worthy for next April. The volume of defensive breakdowns seemed to go through the roof, and the goaltending was consistently worse than the opponent in the other net. The common refrain of “we are outplaying them and outshooting them and just faced a hot goalie…or just could not catch a break…or made a couple too many mistakes… that everyone hoped was locked away for good returned. And though it is not pervasive in the media and on Twitter, the hated word “fragile… did come to my mind over the past couple weeks.
But there is a chance that the feel-good Montreal win turns the tide. The schedule in January is favorable. There is hope that John-Michael Liles can boost the ailing power play.
It is clearly that time of year when you just need to scratch and claw for points however you can get them. That applies to any single game – you gladly accept good results however you can get them. But over the course of 42 more games, it is hard to haphazardly find new ways to win or even steal enough points to outplay 5 of the other teams in the Metro Division down the stretch.
And that is my biggest fear right now. I worry that along the path of recent struggles the team lost track of who it is, or even wants to be, and in the process lost its identity. The brand of hockey that the Canes are playing right now, even in wins looks eerily similar to the brand it was playing when it collapsed last spring. The team is regularly winning the battle in terms of outchancing opponents. But while playing a fire brigade brand of hockey that nets medium-grade chances in high volume it is suffering repeated defensive breakdowns that are putting the team on the wrong side of the ledger in terms of true Grade A/best 5-6 chances of the game opportunities. And they are paying for it. I am on record as liking the John-Michael Liles trade before it even happened. It is NOT that I am certain that Liles will work out. He is a reclamation project at this point after a couple real rough years in Toronto. It is that Gleason had become a redundant skill set with the Canes having an oversupply of physical, stay-home defenseman and that Liles at least brings a different skill set that COULD help the team. But in terms of getting back to basics even the good version of Liles leans more offense than defense. So the question I have for Kirk Muller is what is the repeatable winning model that he is striving for right now? I think the lineup over the next couple days could be telling. If Muller plays both Murphy and Liles (and especially if he plays them on separate lines) that seems to scream up tempo, high-scoring and 4-3 wins. If Muller instead 1st tries Liles as a more veteran replacement for Murphy and leaves the more defensive part of the blue line intact, that would seem to suggest a desire to return to a model that looks more like October and early November’s success hopefully with an improved power play.
Regardless of if the team wants to push for a 4-3 up tempo type of style or button things down a little bit more, it is crucial that the team eliminate the volume of bad defensive breakdowns that have crept back into its game. Good teams prey on this kind of weakness. Even lesser teams can regularly ride gifts to enough goals to steal games that they did not deserve to win.
After a couple rough weeks of hockey, Muller and the team need to get away from tallying scoring chances to define if they played well and shift the emphasis to grade A scoring chances, otherwise I fear we are set to see a stretch of more rough hockey that sees the Canes outchance/outshoot opponents by decent margins and still have to do losing post-game press conferences in which they point to the wrong stats and grumble how they deserved better.
That leads to my keys for the game tonight:
1) Back to basics defensively. This was #1 Tuesday night as well. The Canes failed to execute it but managed a win only because the refs turned it into a power play games (surprisingly to the Canes advantage for once) and because the hockey gods were off celebrating the holiday and failed to step in and prevent the Canes from winning a game that they did not deserve based on the 1st 40 minutes of play regardless of what they did in the 3rd period.
KEY STAT IS NOT "SCORING CHANCES" OR "SHOTS." IT IS "GRADE A SCORING CHANCES." Team that gets most of the best 10-12 chances usually wins. The massive volume of lesser chances past that matters less, especially when 1 team gifts away too many of the top-tier chances.
2) Stay 5v5. The Canes need to stay out of the box and play as much of this game at even strength as possible. I like the late surge by the power play Tuesday night and am curious to see if the Canes can build on it. I am anxious to see if Liles can help improve the puck distribution. But all of this should wait for a different team on a different night.
3) Confidence and intensity level. The Canes have been better than Washington in 3 games this season despite winning only 2 of them. Hopefully the win on Tuesday relieves pressure a bit and gets the team back to just playing solid hockey with a consistent intensity level. With its high-end skill and strong power play, Washington is exactly the kind of team that will pounce on any lulls in play and confidence and turn very short stretches of weak play into goals against. The Canes need to find 60 minutes of play or risk having another decent 55-minute night somehow turn into a loss.
My rough math says that the Canes need to collect 24 points in the 18 games leading up to the Olympic break (so 12-6 with adjustments for OTL points). Here is hoping that the Canes can build on Tuesday’s win, continue its strong play against the Caps and pick up the 1st 2 points in January on the 1st try.
With the lineup changes, there are a couple of things I will be watching for early in the game: --How heavily will Muller lean on his top centers minus Riley Nash? With a day off before and after this important game, my wild guess is that both Staals will see some extra shifts. --What does Muller do for D pairings if Liles in the lineup? Does he pair the 2 offensive guys (Murphy, Liles) together in the bottom pairing, shield them a bit and use them together on the power play? Does he give Murphy a day off while he starts to figure out how best to use Liles and what level of play he is at right now? Does he shuffle things up a bit and go with a puck mover on each of the bottom 2 pairings? Personally, I would go with Komisarek/Liles for a game minus Murphy to get a quick assessment of where Liles is, but you can make a case for a number of different things. --Can this team tighten things up defensively again, especially early in the game, or does the string of loose defensive hockey continue?
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