I don’t recall the last time that I did this, but with this being the biggest game since June of 2006, I think that it’s pretty much obligatory.

First Period

18:00 - Kid line out for a faceoff in their own end. Looks like MacT will be matching lines tonight; the Canucks had tossed Cowan/Linden/Rypien out on the ice.

16:49 - Sedins against GlenX and the Stortziaks. I know that MacT has talked about how he’s willing to play them against anyone but I’m still not buying it; a couple of chances and the puck spent the whole shift in the Oilers end before Pitkanen iced it.

14:40 - Ugly looking defensive work by the Greene/Smid duo on a rush. The Canucks fourth line is out there, Smid challenges the puck carrier, a forward gets in behind him and Greene somehow doesn’t have position. Frustrating.

11:30 - The Canucks first PP ends and the Oilers toss out Gagner/Hemsky/Nilsson. Nothing much happens but I can’t remember the last time that the Oilers had this kind of offensive talent to throw on the ice after the opposition had a PP. The past few years, first liners Smyth/Horcoff have been a huge part of the PK and there hasn’t been a lot of other guys with the ability to score at ES.

10:19 - Ferraro is into the game tonight, ripping Luongo for diving, despite contact having been made with him. Oilers go to the PP. I know that there’s been a lot of excitement about the resurgent Oilers PP and I hate to be a nattering nabob of negativity but I have a hard time believing that it’s real, when they still don’t get very many shots. Desjardins has them as the worst in the league at generating PP shots and third in shooting percentage. That’s not a great mix.

7:30 - I had lunch with a friend today and we were talking about Tom Gilbert and Joni Pitkanen. One of the things i really like about Gilbert is his ability to read when there’s a great chance to sneak in. Pitkanen seems a lot more aggressive that way - the Oilers are on the PP and Pitkanen looks to be filling the old Samsonov role, down below the goal line, while Sam Gagner plays the point. It doesn’t strike me as a very effective use of resources.

5:08 - I’m wondering if it’s a PPV tonight in Calgary. Oilers look to be the Sportsnet game and they just showed a highlight from Calgary that looks like it was shot with an early model webcam. Also, Roli almost lets in one from the side of the net. Is there a goalie who’s let in more goals from the side of the net over the past two years? Shots like that seem to give him more trouble than shots in the slot.

2:40 - I haven’t seen this many cross-seam passes on the Oilers PP since the days of the Hemsky/Spacek connection.

I haven’t been watching Andy Dolphin’s stuff too closely this year but he has the entire NW Division in his top 12 by Improved RPI. I’m a little suspicious of his numbers and think that his Predictive number is probably the best but it really is amazing how this team has gotten up off the canvas.

Second Period

19:00 - Ferraro is putting on a Millionsesque performance tonight in terms of openly rooting for the Oilers. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s been given a small bit of hope by recent results. 1-0 Canucks, as Tom Gilbert puts in a rebound. Kind of a rough play by Pitkanen leading to the goal - I would have hoped that Pitkanen would do a better job of taking away that chance to shoot for Daniel Sedin.

17:14 - Cats marrying dogs, the Oilers on a 10-2 run and Zach Stortini winning two punch knockouts. When you’re hot, you’re hot.

16:00 - Interesting contrast between a play that drew a penalty last game and one that didn’t tonight. In the Phoenix game, Mike York catches the puck in his hand, does a spin and then throws it back to his defenceman. War criminal Alex Burrows was just lying on the ice in the Canucks end, closes his hand on the puck, starts to throw it to someone, stops, brings it back and then throws it. How the one is a penalty and the other isn’t is beyond me.

12:00 - I’m not really a huge Penner fan but the Beckhamesque play he just made in the neutral zone, kicking the puck to Stoll and creating a scoring chance for Nilsson off the rush might have been his best neutral zone play of the season.

11:11 - Obviously, the boys in the Toronto office are reading this and in communication with the referees. Naslund to the box for, yes, closing his hand on the puck.

2:05 - Well, might be next year country for the Oilers with that goal. Tough one for the Oilers, although it ties into something that has been discussed at Lowetide’s site recently. Some of the commenters there take issue with the value of the Corsi numbers, arguing that there’s something to be said for the teams that sag and then counter with a good chance. I’m kind of agnostic on the issue but Matt Pettinger’s goal is cetainly a data point in their favour.

Out in the Oilogosphere, PJO seems to have taken up interviewing writers as he has interviews with John MacKinnon and Robin Brownlee on his site.

I’m a bit of a fan of Robin Brownlee. He seems like a no bullshit kind of guy, which I can respect. I find it a bit irritating that he openly acknowledges that he has the story no Smyth but that he won’t share it because he got it off the record; as has been noted here and elsewhere, the incestuous relationship amongst sports reporters and the teams that they cover gets a bit hard to accept at times.

Anyway, there’s an interesting exchange in the piece. PJO asks him about newfangled stats and Brownlee comes back with this:

I’m not the least bit interested in these numbers. I know what I see and I know what I think. I’ll go with that over pages of statistics any day. As for GMs, that’s a broad question. I suspect there’s a wide range in answers for that.

David Staples noted these posts on his own site and made the following point, which I have to agree with:

…my problem with Brownlee’s answer is that, of course, in his own writing he does refer to stats, but only to the traditional stats — goals, points, assists, plus/minus. Yet these stats can be misleading.

One twenty goal scorer may get most of his goals on the power play, and most of his even strength goals against weaker competition, as he’s not on his team’s top line. Another twenty goal scorer may get most of his goals at even strength, against tough opposition. These are two very different players, but some fans and sportswriters will look at their raw goal scoring data and conclude they are the same.

Then there’s plus/minus — another stat that sportswriters refer to all the time — but a highly problematic stat in that players can have nothing to do with a goal being scored for or against yet they still receive a “plus” or a “minus” on the play. At least when a “goal” is awarded we know the goal scorer had to have touched the puck in some way, but there’s no such comfort with plus/minus.

That’s an excellent point and one that was underlined by Brownlee’s comments on the Lupul trade:

…That Lupul was a mistake here is pure hindsight.

The thing is, if you looked at some of the stats that Brownlee doesn’t care for, there were all sorts of red flags, most particularly in that Lupul was at the bottom of team with excellent goaltending in plus/minus, that he had a ton of PP time that he didn’t do much with and that he was clearly not the guy driving the PP. You can argue that the trade was made for Lupul’s potential but it was sold as if he was a legit top two line guy on a competitive team. I’d argue that if Brownlee perused the numbers on Lupul he might have had some concerns at the start of the season.

As for the John MacKinnon piece, this bit jumped out at me, in response to a question about Pat LaForge’s infamous “A 39MM cap would mean the world to us”, reported in Feb. 2007, a few months before the Oilers decided to spend $50MM:

First, in reading the Naylor piece, it seems to me this was written not in Feb. 2007 but Feb. 2006. LaForge is quoted, for example, talking about an 89 cent dollar. But the dollar is at par with the U.S. greenback right now.

I’m not quite sure what the hell is going on there but the dollar was at 86 cents or so in February and went up about 10 cents between then and July, when the Oilers were throwing money at anyone with a pulse and two
one functioning shoulder. I think MacKinnon got a little turned around on that question, which is a good one. Brownlee’s answer?

I don’t see anything as intentionally misleading, but I think LaForge should stick to shaking hands and selling tickets and leave salary cap comments to people on the hockey operations side of things — as in Kevin Lowe.

Nice.

Third Period

15:00 - Nice little playoff run while it lasted. 3-0 Canucks, as the Oilers give up another goal where a guy has made a cute play that befuddles a defenceman. This time it was Smid getting fooled, by a somewhat lesser talent than Daniel Sedin, in the person of Ryan Shannon.

10:45 - It’d be nice if Smid started making his decisions at NHL speed any time now. Nice sequence there, ends up with the puck on his stick with some time to shoot or pass. He takes too long to make a decision and then finally lobs one towards the net once he gets pressured. Puck knocked away and nothing results. Frustrating.

9:50 - As I’m writing the previous comment, Gilbert gets the puck, finds his spot and gets a quick shot off. 3-1 Canucks.

8:12 - Watching this game, and watching the Oilers just pour on the pressure here, it feels like one of those games in which they’ll come back. The Canucks are just playing too passively, sitting back too much. As I write this, they take a penalty as an Oiler had one of them beat and was heading towards the net. Huge moment.

6:40 - Tough to bitch about the non-call on Hemsky there with the angle from centre ice showing he went down pretty easy but that’s a tough one. Roli hasn’t really made the big save tonight and it’s 4-1 Canucks.

There are three minutes left but, realistically, that’s all she wrote for the Oilers. At this point in time, I don’t think that they’re a presumptive playoff team heading into next year but it’s going to be interesting nonetheless. There are still going to be growing pains for the youngsters, as promising as they are. As of the start of tonight’s game, Cogliano and Nilsson were all over 2.0 ESP/60 and Gagner was within a rounding error. That’s rare for players that young; I’ll have to take a look and see if a team has ever had three of these guys at the same time. At the very least, there’s hope that you can run them against soft minutes next year and have them hold their own.

Watching tonight’s game, you get the feeling that the Oilers had the Canucks on the edge of a tipping point at times throughout the game. Would a healthy Raffi Torres and Shawn Horcoff have made a difference? On that note, I’m noticing some commentary at the various Oilers related sites suggesting that GlenX could replace Torres. Torres’ contributions are being undervalued, I think. Those who think that that’s a reasonable opportunity should check to see how much time GlenX played against the Sedins tonight and then look at some of the earlier games this year to see what kind of minutes Torres played against them. Torres was in the three minute range earlier this year against the Sedins but then played a game where he spent 8 minutes or so on the ice with them in his last game against them. I would suggest it’s a long way from GlenX’s sole shift with the Sedins tonight (spent in the Oilers’ end of the ice) to having the coach comfortable using you in that type of a role.