After shutting down the Penguins offense on Thursday night, the Dallas Stars welcomed the high-flying Chicago Blackhawks to the American Airlines Center Saturday night, a team they haven’t had a ton of great success against the last couple of season.
The Stars luckily continued their solid play with a shutout of the Hawks, sending a host of Blackhawks fans in red gear leaving downtown Dallas a little less rowdy than when they arrived.
What did the numbers say about the Stars’ win?
I was surprised when I pulled this graph up. I thought the Stars were in control for most of the game, but the Hawks won the shot attempt battle. In the third period, you can tell the Stars were content to play it safe.
In these posts, I will also be including a chart that shows scoring chances. Scoring chances are loosely defined as shots generated from inside the black outlined area below.
Both teams traded scoring chances fairly even until early in the second when the Stars pulled away. Leaders in individual scoring chances were Patrick Eaves (5) and Colton Sceviour (4).
In these posts, you will also see a few abbreviations and terms used.
CF, CA, C+/- and CF% are Corsi For, Corsi Against, and Corsi For Percentage. They are defined as follows,
Corsi For: The number of on-ice shot attempts (on goal, missed, or blocked) taken by the player’s team.
Corsi Against: The number of on-ice shot attempts (on goal, missed, or blocked) taken by the opposing team.
Corsi%: The percentage of on-ice shot attempts (on goal, missed, or blocked) taken by the player’s team; also known as CF%.
Not very pretty. Patrick Eaves, Alex Goligoski, Ales Hemsky, and Jason Spezza were the only players above 50 percent.
This was a game that the eyeballs and numbers didn’t see eye to eye. I thought the Stars were the better team all night, and the score illustrates that but the fancy stats don’t.
How I see it, this game was redemption for the many games the Stars won the numbers battle, but lost the game.
Graphs and numbers taken from War-on-Ice and hockeystats.ca