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By the Numbers: Statistical Recap of the Dallas Stars at Washington Capitals

The Dallas Stars headed to the nations’s capital to end their five-game road trip against the Washington Capitals. Winners of two in a row and four of their last five, Dallas put together a rather dominating performance. Goals. Defense. Netminding. Solid effort in all three phases.

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The Stars bucked their recent trend of slow starts and jumped out to a quick 1-0 lead just three minutes into the game after a Capitals penalty. The Capitals were pretty much non-existent until about the nine minute mark and looked as if they were caught off guard by the current Stars play, fast and physical in your face hockey. After going up 1-0, the Stars still weren’t playing great. It appears that both teams traded chances for roughly 5 minutes and around the 15 minute mark is when Dallas really started dominating before the end of the 1st.

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The 2nd period started slowly for both teams until Kari Lehtonen was forced to save a Brooks Laich 1-on-1 after a poor line change by the Stars. Kari hasn’t been able to make those big saves when the team needed him to many times this year, but he was able to this time and the Stars responded and rewarded their goalie with absolutely dominating play. The Stars increased their shot attempts from 19 to 34 in the 5 minutes following the big save.

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The 3rd period was mainly a score effects period. The Stars were up 4-1 and were content to take fewer risks and just concentrate on getting out of Washington with the win.

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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.

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You can tell just how dominant the Dallas Stars were for most of the night. The Stars had been outplaying the Capitals before the big save in the 2nd, but after it is where they really responded and began dominating the Capitals.

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%.

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The McKenzie-Horcoff-Ritchie line led the way with CF% in the 80’s and continue to be worth the price of admission with their solid play.

Can we just play 82 road games against the Eastern Conference?

Graphs and numbers taken from War-on-Ice and hockeystats.ca

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