Jets Nation Recap: Back to winning!

The Winnipeg Jets out score the Vancouver Canucks in what ended up a crazy shooting gallery for both teams.

The first period saw five goals as the netminders gave a what-not-to-do goaltender clinic. Jim Slater opened the scoring from a sweet backdoor pass from Jiri Tlusty. The Jets then brought it up to a two goal lead with Michael Frolik picking up his 18th of the season, only to have each of the Sedin’s score to tie up the game. The period ended with Lee Stempniak scoring with less than two minutes remaining.

The second period was much of the same, but with less goals scored. The teams traded goals, with the Jets’ coming from Mark Scheifele and the Canucks’ coming from Alex Burrows.

In the third Stempniak scored the insurance goal with a nice deke into Eddie Lack’s five-hole. Burrows got his second of the game with Lack pulled, but the Canucks were unable to get the game tying goal.

Let’s break it down.

Not So Pavelectric – Ondrej Pavelec picks up his third Really Bad Start in a row, and now sits with a 0.859 over his last three games combined. He did make some good saves, but when you are a NHL player, all goalies do. The team had some defensive errors, but all 30 teams do.

5-on-5 Dominance – For third game in a row, the Jets dominated at even strength. The Jets forward depth is really something that any team in the league has difficulty to match up against. Let’s get real here, Jiri Tlusty is on the fourth line because the Jets have 9 other legitimate and bonafide top-nine talents.

Play Off Push – Micah McCurdy’s model over at Hockeystats.ca had a regulation loss as a -20 percentage point in impact against the Jets playoff probabilities. Luckily (well more fortunately than luckily) the Jets won which instead improved the Jets chances by 10 percentage points, which now situates them at 73.2% until the Calgary Flames and Los Angeles Kings play their game.

Individual scoring chances (iSC), shot attempt differential (Corsi +/-), non-blocked shot attempt differential (Fen +/-), and offensive zone face off as percentage of all non-neutral zone face-offs:

Shot attempt chart for all minutes:

(Courtesy: hockeystats.ca)

Shot location chart:

(Courtesy: war-on-ice)

Back to winning, with myself in a bar in Vancouver wearing a Blake Wheeler jersey… back to the head nods.