Breaking Down: Weak Yet Effective Homestand

I wouldn’t say any of the 3 games this week were must see TV. Calgary was the traditional poor performance on the first home game after a road trip. The Flyers game was the best of the 3 but there were still warts. The game vs New Jersey on Friday was awful. And they got 5 out of 6 points!

The Avs are the top scoring team in the league and have the best record over the last month and a half, since the blowout win vs Nashville. They win games easily while playing mediocre. We’ve come a long way in 2 years.

Projectile Lineup

The only lineup changes the Avs made were getting Kadri back vs Philly after Kamenev got a start on Monday and having Grubi as the backup on Friday instead of Adam Werner. The 3HM was united briefly but wasn’t effective. Coach Bednar has gone with MacKinnon between Burky and Donskoi for the most part but there’s been blending throughout due to inconsistent play. The defense was the same in all 3 games and Francouz started all of them. Cale Makar was put on injured reserve Saturday morning.

Burky – Mack – Donskoi
Landy – Kadri – Mikko
Nuke – PEB – Calvert
Nieto – Jost – Compher

Z – Sam
Graves – Cole
Barbs – Rosen

Frank
Grubi

Scratch: Kamenev
Injured: EJ (LBI), Makar (UBI), Wilson (LBI)

Team Stats

I think we can all agree that the Avs were not at their best this week but statistically they did fine. All 3 games were close for a change and they had the upper hand in all the shot metrics. Shooting percentage 5v5 was strong but not unreasonable at 9.3% and GF/xGF was 1.4 which is around season average.

As a team, all the shot metric percentages were in their favor but it was driven by the bottom 6 forwards for the most part. Colorado has been in quite a few blowouts and play with the lead a large part of the time so the season numbers aren’t as strong as straight up scoring. This troubles some folks and it probably shouldn’t. They play in score & game effected situations a lot. This week they played relatively close games. Calgary went to OT, Philly was close for the first 40 minutes or so and even though the Devils game didn’t feel close, it was from a strategy standpoint. Consequently their shot metrics were much stronger than usual, all around the mid-50’s in percentages for attempts, shots and expected goals. This indicates to me that they can control the game when it matters. Overall shot pace at 5v5 was a fairly average 122 shots per hour.

Special teams were the usual. Power play went 1 for 9 and looked terrible. Penalty kill was 8 for 9 making for a perfect net nothing from both units. For the season the Avs are dead middle on PP at 16th and 18.5% and 19th on PK at 79.8%.

Bottom line is that while not looking dominant and reintegrating a couple of players out long term along with having half their top 4 defensemen (and both right-handers) in the press box, they were able to control play fairly easily.

TOI

Over the week the top 6 forwards at 5v5 were Mack (16), Mikko (15), Landy (14+), Kadri (13), Calvert (12) and Burakovsky (11+). It was fairly even usage with the only 2 players averaging under 10 minutes were Vlad Kamenev, who only played one game, and Matt Nieto.

The defensive regime went Big Z (19), Sam (17+), Graves (17), Cole (16), Barbs (13) and Rosen (12+). Again, it was very even usage especially in a week of close games.

Individual

– Nate MacKinnon is your scoring star of the week with 2 goals and 3 assists (all primary). His 17 SOG is more than twice Mikko, Graves and Nieto in 2nd with 8 each. He had 1.65 expected goals, just over twice Joonas Donskoi who had 0.82 (shoutout to Tyson Jost with 0.74 in 3rd).

– Watching the progression of Val Nichushkin over the past few weeks has been fantastic. I was 100% not on board with this signing and in all fairness it looked pretty dumb. A former 10th overall who had failed out of Dallas, twice, and hadn’t scored in an NHL game in several years, it was another prayer that wouldn’t be answered. Fast forward a few months and he’s making a push to be the most effective bottom 6er in the league. Nuke backed up his solid road trip with a point per game week (2G/1A) while playing an effective 13 minutes at 5v5 per night on the Avs top possession line. Well done sir.

– Pavel Francouz went 2-0-1 with all 3 starts this week due to Grubi’s LBI. He saw 104 shots on goal and saved all but 7. He’s afforded the Avs a luxury of waiting until Grubauer completely recovers from whatever ails him and in some respects has outplayed Grubi. I don’t think it’s a goalie controversy situation, yet, but the potential is there for Frank to start the conversation.

Burgundy Narrative Metric

– “Best guys being your best guys” gets a (+) Mack is a treasure
– Quality vs Quantity gets a (+) quantity was ok, more quality that usual
– Power Play Watchability gets a (-) with all the coaches fired lately the Avs could follow suit with Ray Bennett quite easily.
– The Dreaded Turtle gets a (+) They did turtle a bunch in the PHI/NJ games and all 2 goals came from sitting on the lead
– Starting Goalie Battle% gets a (+) look out Grubi, Frank wants your job
– Referee Oppression Index gets a (+) did you hear about Tim Peel?

Total: +4¾

Next up

A big week with St Louis Monday then two games vs the Hawks with the Hurricanes sandwiched in between.

Thanks as always to the NHL and Natural Stat Trick for numbers and visuals