A famous gambler once crooned, ‘You gotta know when to hold ‘em ... know when to fold ‘em.’
The Columbus Blue Jackets had a choice this season approaching the trade deadline. Should he trade away Artemi Panarin and Sergei Bobrovsky, fold ‘em? Or should he hold ‘em?
They ‘held ‘em’ and then added Matt Duchene and Ryan Dzingel at the deadline.
They’re all in, to borrow a poker term.
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Heading into Tuesday night’s game against the New Jersey Devils, Columbus with 75 points in 65 games trailed for the final Wild Card spot held by the Montreal Canadiens by two points, with a game at hand. The Pittsburgh Penguins also had 77 points with a game at hand over the Canadiens, having played only 65 games. It’s a good thing the Blue Jackets emerged with the two points against the Devils – even with it requiring a shootout – with the Penguins and Canadiens both winning.
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Adding to the drama, Columbus and Pittsburgh face off in a home-and-home series entering the weekend. Once their done with them, they face the surprising division leading, New York Islanders. And to make it more difficult, another two-game series against the Boston Bruins next week before heading out west. They face the Montreal Canadiens late in March.
Staving off potential elimination and adversity, Columbus faces the Ottawa Senators in the final game of the regular season. How crazy would it be for the Senators to hold the playoff fate of the Blue Jackets?
Using data from the website Evolving-Hockey, I put together this rolling 10-game average of the Blue Jackets offense, expected goals (xG) and goals scored, and the defensive side, expected goals against, and goals against.
It’s been boom or bust offensive production this season for Columbus. The charts above show the team seems to peak, then bounce off the expected goal line, which is acting as a support. Only recently has the real (observed) goals breached below the expected goals. At the most critical time of the season, they’ve finally dipped below their expected goals, even with the deadline additions.
In the four games since the deadline, Columbus hasn’t scored at 5v5 in two of the games, and shutout entirely by the bottom-feeding Oilers 4-0. They scored once against the Devils last night.
At 5v4, they’ve produced within a range around the 0.6 until a downturn at the end of November to an early January low and bouncing back to the 0.8 range, and finally eclipsing the expected goals mark, before falling back to follow the expected goals line.
Individual Lines
Using data from Moneypuck.com that supplies line data (now with Corsica going offline, this is an invaluable resource), it’s a little concerning that the Blue Jackets offense was so heavily dependent on two forward lines at 5v5, the Panarin/Dubois/Atkinson trio, or the Foligno/Jenner/Anderson unit. The first line had exceeded their expected goals (xG) by a fair margin (14.9 goals to be exact). The second unit outperformed their xG by 5.84 goals.
The remaining combinations are all provisional changing with incorporation of new personnel solidifying and providing some semblance of stability among forward lines. It’s not like Columbus coach, John Tortorella, has really used so many combinations. League wide, they’re among the least amount of line combos this season (data cutoff was March 4, 2019).
Focusing on the Blue Jackets, they have used 292 different combinations and bettering their expected goals by 11.28, while also oddly demarking the cutoff for teams that didn’t meet expectations (in red).
The new players haven’t seen much action but this is the breakdown of how they’ve been used thus far. There’s two established lines and a bunch of one-offs or combination that coaches tried out, or an event with a line change.
Matt Duchene has been inserted in the yellow lines, and Ryan Dzingel in blue. The orange lines depict both Sens players on the same line. Both players have appeared in a dozen different combinations each, and twice together – even scoring a goal at 5v5. Duchene’s line with Panarin and Atkinson has produced one goal as well.
If there’s one thing the deadline additions from the Senators will do is provide balance among the scoring lines, even though that hasn’t really materialized yet.
Columbus knows not to count their money while their sitting at the table. There’ll be time enough for counting when the season’s done.
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Using data from Moneypuck.com, I’ve created an Excel workbook that has isolated lines and performance using expected goals and goals scored. A copy of that workbook is here, for you, which has line performance charts similar to this one shown above, for all NHL teams. The workbook contains a pivot table that updates and changes with input from a button for each team.
To get more recent data, click on the Moneypuck.com and look for the Lines/Pairings link for 2018-19. The link will contain updated data in a .csv file (an Excel file). Refresh the data for the current season in the workbook and you can use the same pivot table with updated values.
I should have introduced more of the workbooks that I’ve used in the basis for analysis within these pages. I structure some of them as visuals for presentation purposes and structured data for analysis.
It’s my hope more readers find and use data if they are curious about a variety of hockey related questions. Most of the time, those answers reside within the data, if you know where to look and maybe with more organized workbooks, some of the legwork has already been done.
Don’t forget to visit and support the hobbyist sites. I use Natural Stat Trick, Evolving-Hockey, HockeyViz and MoneyPuck.com most, but not limited to those sites. For microstats and manual tracking, the irreplaceable Corey Sznajder.
