A look into some underlying numbers from Detroit's season opening defeat in Newark
On Thursday night, the Detroit Red Wings fell by a 4-3 score to the New Jersey Devils in Newark. For a full qualitative review of the evening, click here. For now, let's take a look at some of the numbers that defined the defeat.
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Box Score At a Glance
In the losing effort, the Red Wings outshot the Devils 35-27. Detroit won 56% of the evening's face-off and was out-hit by New Jersey 24-32.
Early on in the evening, ESPN flashed a chyron across the bottom of the screen with a reminder that a year ago the Red Wings were 29th in the league in shots per game with 28.2. If Thursday night was any indicator, Detroit will play at a faster pace than it did (or could) a year ago, and that should correspond to an uptick in shot attempts. The question then becomes the Red Wings' ability to ratchet up the pace without opening up more room for their opponents on the counter.
The Big Picture
-The expected goals, courtesy of MoneyPuck.com, favored the Devils (4.31-4.00). For a better sense of what that looked like, let's take a look at some more details.
-First, here's a heat map of 5-on-5 unblocked shots. As you can see, New Jersey did a better job than the Red Wings of creating premium chances in the inner slot. While a significant portion of Detroit's chances came from high ice at the point or even along either half-wall, the Devils were able to concentrate their offensive energy in the home plate area between the face-off dots and the net.
This ability to create interior chances helps to explain how New Jersey accrued more expected goals than did the Red Wings, despite being outshot.
-On special teams, the margin between the two sides was narrow. Each team scored a power play goal (Alex DeBrincat for Detroit and Jack Hughes for New Jersey), and both sides created danger around the net.
Each team had five PP shots for, but it took the Devils six power play chances to accumulate those shots, whereas Detroit had just four. Meanwhile, New Jersey yielded the Red Wings three short-handed shots, while Detroit did not give up anything to the Devils short-handed.
Individual Impacts
This chart from MoneyPuck shows the individual leaders in individual expected goals for each team. As you can see, Robby Fabbri led the way for the Red Wings, with Alex DeBrincat and Andrew Copp not far behind.
-One positive to glean from this chart is that Detroit's three top performers came from three different lines, providing evidence that the Red Wings' newfound added depth is paying dividends.
-At an individual level, there is always risk in reading too much into single game on-ice possession numbers, but I do want to shout out a few stand-outs from Thursday.
First, newcomer Justin Holl led the way for Detroit as far as on-ice xG share at five-on-five, posting a 71.06% mark in that regard in his Red Wing debut. Not far behind were the three constituents of the Detroit fourth line: Klim Kostin (69.04%), Joe Veleno (68.57%), and Christian Fischer (67.20%) (all figures from MoneyPuck).
For that fourth line to be useful to Derek Lalonde, it needs to play on the front foot—forcing play into the offensive third of the rink and keeping opponents hemmed in there. None of those three forwards played even 10 minutes at five-on-five, but, with the energy boost associated with a relatively light even strength workload, they were able to do exactly what's expected of them.
-Another bright spot for Detroit was the top defensive pairing of Jake Walman and Moritz Seider. The two played the most minutes of any Red Wing skaters (Seider at 26:14, Walman at 21:22), and they were effective in doing so. Per MoneyPuck, as a pairing, Walman and Seider played 13:08 together at five-on-five and delivered an impeccable 61.7% xG share in those minutes.
Having illustrated their chemistry through the tail end of last season, Seider and Walman have been the one fixture on the back end amidst pre-season tinkering. With Walman in particular, it's encouraging to see that the (very early) returns suggest a continued comfort with playing in a top pair role, even against a formidable attacking opponent.
-Though DeBrincat notched a power play goal, Detroit's top line (DeBrincat-Larkin-Perron) struggled to put much together at even strength. Again, per MoneyPuck, in 8:13 together, the trio posed just 0.09 xG worth of danger to the New Jersey net, while surrendering .726 xG against for a woeful 11.1% xG share. On some level, this is a reminder of the need to take single game on-ice stats with a grain of salt, but there's also no denying that this was an underwhelming performance. By game's end, Larkin and DeBrincat took a few shifts with Lucas Raymond, and there seemed to be a bit more chemistry there. It will be worth monitoring that space heading into Saturday night.
-Finally, in net, Ville Husso played 57 minutes and 48 seconds before being lifted late for the extra attacker. In that time, New Jersey put 3.076 xG on net, and Husso surrendered three goals. In other words, he was slightly better than average given the workload he faced. A year ago, Husso averaged -0.274 goals saved above expected per 60 minutes of action (again from MoneyPuck), so, even if he may have wanted to have back one or perhaps both of Hughes' goals, the performance still represented a marked improvement on last year's results.
