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The Winnipeg Jets lost a tight game to the Boston Bruins where posts and crossbars were just as much a factor as the goalies and players. The Bruins hit four in total and Jets had at least two with one coming late in the game which could have sealed the fate in favour of the visitors.
The story for Jets’ fans is the improved play from the dog’s breakfast known as the home opener. While the top line of Wheeler Little and Ladd is still lacking in the chemistry it found late last year the second line of Kane Jokinen and Wellwood seemed to find some. However, it was the goal scooped in by Chris Thorburn after a Paul Postma blast that gave the Jets the early one goal lead and a bit of wiggle room.
It was the same kind of start as Saturday’s game but this time the nerves and fatigue seemed not to set in and the Jets, and Ondrej Pavelec most importantly, hung on until the bitter end of the shootout.
The play of the game was fast-paced with chances coming off the rush for both teams as the lanes, particularly for Boston, seemed to open up and provide opportunities to put pucks on net.
The challenge for the Jets last season was to keep pucks out of the net when they found themselves in a run and gun style of game. Today that happened. Both Rask and Pavelec made 26 saves on 27 shots and kept their teams in the game at many points throughout the three periods of play.
Unfortunately for the Jets they had a powerplay late in the game which rolled into the OT period and then had another when Chara took down a driving Blake Wheeler. The powerplay unit would fail to capitalize and more questions about it’s effectiveness were raised than answered as it went 0-4 on the day. I’ll come back to this in a bit.
Interestingly enough in a 2 goal game going to shootout the Boston media provided ample evidence of homerism as they awarded all three stars to the Bruins.
Driving in the afternoon I was listening to the post game show on TSN Radio 1290 where Rick Ralph and former Winnipeg Free Press columnist Adam Wazny discussed the game and its events. One comment that Wazny made me tweet out a question “What stat back’s up Wazny’s claim that ‘more often than not a team ends it on OT PP’?”
The response came pretty quick when Winnipeg Free Press columnist and host of the Hustler and Lawless show on TSN 1290 Gary Lawless-
@garylawless- responded with “What stat refutes it?”
A valid question and one that got me thinking- what is the value of an overtime powerplay? For that I looked at a query on
hockey-reference.com,
behindthenet, and
nhl numbers along with the NHL.com website. I could not find what I was looking for in terms of team or league overtime power play percentage.
I fired off a tweet to Winnipeg’s own Stats Inc. guru Tim Heibert follow him here
@timheibert and he was able to provide league 4 on 4 and 4 on 3 but nothing OT specific.
I was left to the old way, doing it myself and below are the results for 2011-12. What I looked for was penaltied in the last two minutes of a game that carried over into overtime and penalties called in overtime and looked at the successes versus attempts.
October 2011 6/16 for 37.5%
November 2011 4/17 for 23.5%
December 2011 3/9 for 33.3%
January 2012 5/14 for 35.7%
February 2012 1/15 for 6.6%
March 2012 3/15 for 20%
April 2012 1/5 for 20%
For the season it was 23/91 attempts for a 25.2% success rate of scoring a goal in OT when on the power play. For some teams that is a significant increase to their regular PP percentage, almost a raw 10-5% spread increase or a pro-rated 30-50% increase comparatively.
While it Adam Wazny may not be correct in the truest sense by assuming that more often a team with an OT PP will end the game. It only happens 25% of the time. But when taken into context of what Wazny was trying to get at- that the Jets inability to convert on two OT chances is not good enough, he’s right. The Jets PP% was 12th overall at 17.9% and with two chances at a 39% average increase in success rate was wasted opportunity yesterday.
The good news is the Jets forced the play at the right time to draw penalties. Now coach Claude Noel has to get his PP units going and that’s a hard task when practice times are at a premium with this shortened schedule.
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