Winnipeg-Washington Jan. 22 Corsi

             

 

Winnipeg completed its initial road trip with a very successful evening in DC, beating the Capitals 4-2 via a very complete effort, especially at EV. The Jets’ 2 PP goals were nice, and a welcome change, but the game really turned in the second, when the Jets directed 20 EV shots at Braden Holtby while scoring twice and finishing the game as a competitive affair. 

Again, until Vic gets his Corsi app on the go, I’m running the play by play sheets into Excel and then filtering results to obtain these figures. Here’s the damage from a good night away from home:

 

 

These look a lot closer than the game appeared, and for good reason. Once the Jets hit the third with a three goal lead, they shelled hard, running out the clock while Washington chased the game. After two periods, the Jets were +12 Corsi, +16 Fenwick, which is a drowning when both teams are playing the game straight without score effects getting in the way.

 

On the individual side, you can certainly see how getting a leg up from your coach can make your game look a bit better than it really is. I don’t want to diminish the fine effort that the Ladd-Antropov-Little line put forward, because there’s no correction that would put them in the red, but getting an extra 7 or 9 OZone draws never hurts your bottom line.

 

The converse was true for Jokinen-Kane-Wheeler, and beyond the tougher ZS numbers, they hapened to be on-ice when the Jets really pulled back in the third period. I ran a quick check of their numbers after two, and they were around break even against the Capitals’ top-six, so no real worries should be had about their play.

 

The bottom six had a pretty uneventful night, and if Jim Slater has had many other games for Winnipeg 2.0 where he was on-ice for only 1 DZone faceoff, well, they don’t exactly spring to mind. I would have liked a bit more from Scheifele and Burmistrov on offence, but the big guns were going, so Noel fed them the ice time and opportunities, and correctly so.

 

On defence, Dustin Byfuglien and Tobias Enstrom were the business last night. I wasn’t crazy about Buff’s game in Boston, but he did the job very well against the Caps, playing a pretty clean game by his standards. Of course, when your forwards are playing well, it’s a simpler task to be in the black, but the puck movement to get out of the zone by that duo was spot on.

 

The funniest looking lines of the night were Stuart’s and Hainsey’s, but again, most of the bad came in a late game flurry by Washington where the Jets blocked 5 straight shots. When the game was really in question, they were perfectly fine. That sort of effort is pretty much mandatory until Bogosian comes back if the Jets want to stay alive, obviously, especially given how the third pair is going.

 

Or at least, one of the third pair. Grant Clitsome is having a rough go right now, bleeding shots and chances despite relatively easy EV minutes. If his play doesn’t pick up, he’ll be the one getting a seat rather than Postma when Bogosian returns to duty. Postma’s being sheltered, and with good reason, but he hasn’t had that chaos look in his eyes quite as often in the last two games, so hopefully that’s the first sign that he might be roughly competent against the lower orders as he gains NHL experience. 

 

In the main, the Jets were very good last night, and while the Capitals aided matters by being absolutely atrocious in their own end in the first two periods, Winnipeg deserves the credit for taking advantage when they should have been the tired team. I’m not sure the Jets will get quite so many clean looks on Friday when the quality of competition takes a quantum leap forward, but the team has improved in each game by a non-trivial amount, so yay, optimism, maybe?