Time to Break up Jokinen and Iginla Again

 

Those who heard me on overtime this week with Pat may have been confused by my rather consistent condemnation of the Flames first unit of Jokinen, Iginla and Glencross. Afterall, Jokinen has six points in the last three games, Iginla has three in three and Glencross has three in the last four. Altogether, Calgary’s first line managed a cumulative 12-points in four games.

That seems like good work and some of it was – Calgary’s powerplay looked markedly better than it has for awhile and much of that was the big guns finally finding the range with the man advantage.

It was a totally different story at even strength, however. The thing to keep in mind isn’t merely point totals but the differentials players are generating when they’re on the ice at 5on5. If a player is on the ice for 5 shots in a game and two goals, it’s not worth a whole lot if he gives up 10-shots and 3 goals against.

This was the case with Calgary’s top unit during the road trip. 

The table above shows the top line’s various shot metrics over the last four games. Keep in mind that 50% is the minimum every coach is ideally shooting for with his lines and match-ups because that means his players are at least sawing off possession with the opposition. As such, a .50 ratio is also roughly the league mean for corsi amongst regular skaters. Elite players approach .55-.60 while the worst are south of .45.

With that in mind, you can see that Iginla et al. got their teeth kicked in at even strength. They were out-shot and out-scored fairly handily and boasted overall possession rates comparable to what you’d see out of, say, a barely functional goon over a season.

If you want to know why Calgary was outshot nearly 2-1 and didn’t get a single win on the their road trip (despite the PP suddenly coming alive), look no further. The Flames players with the most ES ice time on the team were spending a lot of it in the defensive end of the rink.

Let’s go a little deeper and look at the Jokinen unit’s score tied shot measures.

The purpose of looking at numbers with the score tied is to eliminate playing to score effects – the tendency for leading teams to sit back and allow the trailing club to rack up more shots/possession.

As you can see, the situation was even more grim when things were tied for the Flames top trio: with them on the ice and the outcome in doubt, the Calgary was outshot to an even greater extent. The team owned just 25-30% of the total shot events with their putatitive top line on the ice. This is a very, very good way to lose hockey games. 

The deleterious effect of poor possession rates isn’t just limited to the first line, of course: bad outshooting by one line can spread across the rest of the team in a sort of ripple effect – particularly if it’s a unit that gets lots of ice. It means less offensive zone draws for every following unit, for instance, which is worth about +0.8 corsi per individual draw. The more time the top line spends in the defensive end, the more difficult it will be for the other units to get the play moving north.

Keep in mind the Flames didn’t exactly face a murderer’s row during their latest sojourn. The Blackhawks are legit and the Panthers are decent, but the Preds and Tampa Bay are near the bottom of the league in terms of controlling the play.

With Jokinen et al. scoring a bit recently, Sutter might be tempted to keep them together at even strength. That would likely prove to be a catastrophic mistake – things don’t get much easier from here on out, especially with the club spending so much time on the road. Unless Kipper stands on his head and the PP continues to score two goals a game, the losses will rapidly mount unless Brent can find a way to get Jarome and company in the offensive zone a lot more.

The way to start would to break-up the perpetually poor partnership between Iginla and Jokinen. Go back to giving Olli and Glencross the tougher assignment so Iginla can have an easier time of it. Put them back together on the PP (because that seems to be working) but the current arrangement at ES is a totally failed experiment.