Pre-Game Skate: Last Second Goals, Buffalo’s Boring, & Tavares on Stats

I was away for a couple days doing a marathon reading of correspondences for the O Positive Festival in Kingston, NY. It’s a great festival for a great cause — providing health care for artists — and the reading was pretty fantastic, ranging from bureaucratic correspondence to the letters of Eleanor Roosevelt, the editor of Chronogram and the now defunct lit mag Letters reading to an author reading some smutty letters she received almost daily for three years from an ex-landlord. There was also a pretty fantastic set by the Greek lutist Xylouris White. I recommend catching him live if you get the chance.

Anyhow, that’s why you haven’t had a Pre-Game Skate from me in a couple of days. Not only have I been remiss in my duties, I’m getting this in after two NHL games have already passed. Due to Columbus Day in the U.S. and Thanksgiving in Canada, the NHL has two matinee games (and neither feature a Canadian team because of course).

Thoughts re: Columbus Day —

If you had to work today and missed the first of the afternoon matches, you missed the Avalanche scoring their first goal of the season. Their second goal of the season came with .5 seconds left in the game and led them to a 2-1 win over the Bruins on Danny Briere‘s 300th career goal. We all love to throw a little shade in the direction of Denver, but it always hurts to see two points come into the division. With Nashville producing offense and the expected bounce back of Dallas and Colorado, the Central Division might be even tougher than we thought.

Despite this being bad on all fronts for Wild fans, it’s a pretty goal. (Briere should have a thank you card in the mail shortly to Dennis Seidenberg for his pretty terrible netfront coverage.)

Anyhow (x2), the pre-game skate isn’t about the Wild, it’s about everything else. Moving on.

Oh, Buffalo

I’ve asserted in the preseason at various points that, while I think the Sabres finish in last place in the Eastern Conference, that they’d be an exciting team to watch with all their young talent. There are so many players on that roster who could be a star in the next few years.

Well, I was wrong. Just needed to publicly apologize.

I’m sorry.

Today’s second NHL matinee was Anaheim at Buffalo and wow, was that boring. The Ducks won the game 5-1 and outshot the Sabres 44 to 12. The game went about how it sounds like it went. Take a look at this chart via hockeystats.ca:

Interesting stat: At one point when the game was 4-1 Michal Neuvirth and Frederik Anderson both had a .900 save percentage. That changed after Ryan Kesler scored on a penalty shot to make it 5-1.

Tavares On

The New York Times ran some ink on the NHL’s progression to advanced stats. Here’s a small excerpt from that article:

"“Advanced stats — back home in Toronto, that’s all people were talking about,” said Islanders center John Tavares, who spent his off-season in one of hockey’s world capitals.In those discussions one would hear excited chatter about zone entries, Corsi On and Fenwick Close — arcane and often bafflingly complex concepts that King Clancy could never have imagined.…The nature of the analytics goes well beyond mining play-by-play data for events. Most teams use their own spotters to track on-ice events, and several, including the Rangers and the Islanders, have upped the ante. They embed tiny sensors in players’ equipment to track movements, creating a GPS map of where each player skated in the game.“I use it personally a little bit — how many times I’m touching the puck in a game, where I’m touching the puck, how I’m making plays and creating opportunities,” Tavares said. “Those are good things to know. When you’re learning or trying to get better, you have to be open-minded, because there’s so much that’s unknown.”"

Notes and Notes

– Patrick Sharp thinks that shooting percentage is stupid.

– Here’s University of Minnesota Golden Gophers’ goaltender Nick Lehr’s new mask.

Tonight’s Games

Well, two are already in the books but here’s what we’ve got left tonight. (All times Central.)

8:30pm
Ottawa Senators (1-1-0) at Florida Panthers (0-1-1)

8:30pm
Montreal Canadiens (3-0) at Tampa Bay Lightning (1-0-1)