A week or two ago, I was compelled to comment over at Sleek's place because the Good Earl was frustrated by his chosen team's money players: Getzlaf, Perry et al. Were being handily outscored by the opposition and the Ducks were in a seeming death spiral:
One specific area that could use some improvement? In the seven games since the trade deadline, Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, and Eric Cristensen have been surrendering even-strength goals at twice the rate that Todd Marchant, Petteri Nokelainen, and Mike Brown have been surrendering goals while shorthanded. The Ducks seemingly would find some easier success if they could stem some of the GA-bleeding from the top line.
Upon reading his (understandably justified) rant, I took a look at ANA's corsi and percentages over the given period of time and discovered the big boys were outshooting the bad guys, but had lousy SH% and SV%. From my comment at the time:
The SV% with Getzlaf on the ice the last 7 games has been .822! For Perry….833. And the SH% for the Ducks with those guys on the ice has been 7 and 8.3% respectively. Those are TERRIBLE rates and it makes me think your big guns have been getting the bad bounces recently.
The day after I made that comment, the Ducks hammered the Avs 7-2 and they've been hot ever since. What happened? The percentages swung back around. Big time:
Getzlaf: .926 SV%, 20.4 SH%
Perry: .933 SV%, 21.6 SH%
Ryan: .915 SV%, 16.3 SH%
Now, I'm not writing this to pat myself on the back or say "I told you so". I bring it up because it seems relevant to the current situation the Flames find themselves in. As you all know, the club has been fighting through it's own bout of offensive doldrums, led in terms of ineffectiveness by the Flames own money players, who have themselves been handily outscored the last few weeks or so. Here's the club's corsi rates and percentages since March 18:
Jarome Iginla: +24, .886 SV%, 5.6 SH%
Olli Jokinen: +17, .884 SV%, 4.3 SH%
Mike Cammalleri: +26, .894 SV%, 4.1 SH%
Now that's bad - probably unsustainably bad. Overall during the period in question, Calgary is +92 in terms corsi, but has a putrid ES PDO (90.3+5.7=96). Kipper isn't making many saves and the opposition has enjoyed a .943% ES SV% in aggregate versus the Flames since the 18th of last month. Add in the sputtering power play and it's stunning that the Flames have won any games at all.
Basically, Calgary has had some shit luck recently. The injuries (and addition of Bertuzzi back into the top 6 ) haven't helped, but one has to assume that the correction is coming sooner or later and pucks are going to start finding the back of the net again. "Sooner" would obviously be preferable, especially with half of the defense corps on the sidelines.
