The Calgary Flames came back from the Christmas break and earned a 3-1 overtime win over the San Jose Sharks.

It’s a Team Game – It was nice that the Flames played a bottom-5 team and came out with the win. Sharks goaltender Yaroslav Askarov showed everyone why he was such a highly touted prospect with a pretty stupendous outing. Calgary was able to push the pace in the first period, dominating all over the ice. The Sharks went over ten straight minutes without registering a shot on net. Special teams caused the next two goals – a rocket by Macklin Celebrini and a sneaker through the pads by Mikael Backlund. The third period and Calgary deciding to play a shell defence against a team this week didn’t sit well with myself, but they got the win despite San Jose coming extremely close after they pulled the goaltender. A deserved win no doubt, but they could work on their third period strategy from my perspective.

Corsi King – After playing most of the year next to Daniil Miromanov (DNP), MacKenzie Weegar (78.27 CF%) has just re-shown it doesn’t matter who he plays with – he knows how to play high-end successful hockey. Now, this was just the San Jose Sharks, but he performed well with Joel Hanley (74.55 per cent) seeing less than double digit shot attempts against as well as only one high danger chance against. On the flip side of things, the fourth line did not win their time on ice. Limited minutes – sprinkled with some decent offensive opportunities – but they gave up more than they created. It’ll happen that way sometimes – the entire team never gave up a 5v5 goal so mentioning them is just myself nitpicking.

Taken By Chance – Sometimes I have to double check the shift chart after I read the numbers to try and find where a certain incident happened. Connor Zary (87.45 SCF% || 100 HDCF%) and Yegor Sharangovich (78.22 per cent || 100 per cent) both got through this game without seeing a 5v5 high danger chance against. Their linemate – Jakob Pelletier (66.84 per cent || 71.68 per cent) – barely, and I mean barely, played any 5v5 minutes without them and yet somehow managed to get dinged with a high danger chance against. Stuff like this is why overall analysis should use larger sample sizes than just one game. This method, I believe, is good for tracking line success and finding slumps and errors in short term spans to be able to coach those and grow out of them. Three players led the team being involved in seven high danger looks – MacKenzie Weegar (82.86 per cent || 88.12 per cent), the human tank that was Brayden Pachal (54.71 per cent || 64.66 per cent), and the two-goal man in Jonathan Huberdeau (70.64 per cent || 71.20 per cent).

xGF% – I’m going to do a quick expected goals refresher for any new readers or people that have found this blog since the start of the year. It can get confusing for those that don’t know or understand and I would like to try and limit as much confusion around these numbers as I possibly can. Expected goals is what I call cumulative quality. Every single shot on the ice is weighted based on a variety of factors that each model specifically picks to matter. Some things that factor in are length of distance from net, the type of shot that was used, how close the defender was to the shooter, etc. Every shot gets counted then with a value – which is just a percentage of a chance that it was going to be a goal. At the end of the game you add up your expected goals for (the chances your team took) and the expected goals against (the ones that happened against you on the night) and you create a ratio. That being said you can – hopefully – see that the 93.20 xGF% Yegor Sharangovich achieved and understand that he spent the majority of his time in the offensive zone creating chances. Zary (93.14 per cent) was right there with him and Martin Pospisil (91.37 per cent) found his way up there as well. If not for Askarov and his wonderful performance I’m positive Calgary did enough to score those elusive four goals that they struggle to achieve regularly.

In The Crease – Dustin Wolf had every right to fall asleep in his crease during the first period. Those are games the goaltender can get lost and unfocused, but that just does not happen with Wolf. He is constantly dialed in and never gets rattled by any situation. He’s shown more than enough already to be the future of this teams goaltending and any rough stretches are going to work their way out of things with time. He had another 5v5 shutout today continuing his top-notch play. He still deserves Calder buzz, but he’ll have a hard time with Macklin Celebrini, Matvei Michkov, and Lane Hutson being as proficient as they are. Still, he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as those three and I don’t want anyone to forget it. 1.44 expected goals against at 5v5 with nothing getting past him.