Stats Recap: Only Score Effects Help Minnesota Wild in 4-0 Loss to Dallas Stars

The Dallas Stars, when they play well, thrive on possession, and that didn’t change in Thursday’s Game 1 victory over the Minnesota Wild. The Stars dominated possession early to build their lead and clamped down on the high danger chances late as they pitched a post-season shutout.

Here’s the general team possession breakdown, courtesy of War-on-Ice:

If you’re relatively new to possession statistics, what we’re seeing here in the 5-on-5 shot attempts is something called score effects, where a team that gets down starts throwing more things at the net while teams who lead are more likely to try and retain possession without shooting as much.

This was especially true in Game 1, as shown by the scoring chance column. The Stars simply smothered the Wild, holding them to only one high-danger scoring chance in the entire time at even strength and two in the whole game. When you can do that, you’re playing a heck of a defensive game.

You can also see how much the Stars used the power play to their advantage in this one. Even without one of their most dangerous snipers, they were able to force the Wild further back into a defensive shell. The Wild didn’t have early as much time with the man advantage, obviously – just three minutes to Dallas’ 11:50, but they also generated only two shot attempts (both blocked) in that time and no high-danger scoring chances.

Finally, here are the individual player possession numbers, first for Dallas:

What sticks out here to me is the zone start disparity. The Stars have clearly decided there are certain players they will sacrifice, for lack of a better turn, to deep starts in their own zone. In this game, that included the fourth line of Sceviour, Fiddler and Janmark along with the defensive pair of Oduya and Johns.

In fact, let’s take a moment to appreciate how well Oduya did in incredibly deep zone starts. The Stars could hardly have buried him more in his own end, and he very nearly broke even at even strength. That’s some impressive defense right there.

The first line also got a lot of deep zone starts (partially because Benn is so dangerous in transition), but except in the case of Eakin, those numbers got pulled much higher overall because of special teams.

And here’s Minnesota’s chart:

Players who want to burn this game tape include Fontaine, Carter and Stoll. Even with score effects, none of them were able to do much in trying to shut down the Stars offense.