Taking a look at the last ten games in Vancouver to see patterns or hidden secrets that might indicate what we should be doing going forward.
The goal is obviously to keep this team on the winning path we are on. So, in looking at the games between January 24 through February 15, during this period the team was 6-4-0 against a nice blend of opponents.
We had games where we had a significant number of Hits and Penalties and a good number of games where we didn’t. What we found was that these two indicators had very little to do with the team’s success or failure.
We then turned our attention to scoring to see if there were certain players or a player that really led the team to victory with their scoring. This proved to be a dead-end also. The sad news was that we had very widespread scoring across multiple players - which really turns out to be a bit of good news.
The one player other than Mark Stone, Ryan O’Reilly, or Philip Danault that seemed to add significant offense was Nikita Gusev. He was injured for a while, but when he returned to the lineup, the offense and power play saw a marked improvement.
Probably the most benefit from this deep dive was that we need to play goaltender Martin Jones a bit more. We are not in trouble with league rules (the 66-game max), but Ben Bishop can use the time off and Jones is a more than capable goalie.
Currently, the team stats aren’t too bad as we are 1st in goals against, 4th in PK, and 10th in faceoff wins at 52.64%. We also find ourselves in first place in the Pacific with 75 points.
As we stated before we are trying not to make too many changes to the team as the chemistry of this team is really great.