What I Watched, Week 5

Celebrini keeping up with the league's elites, Devon Toews' busy game, Tampa's rookies, Simon Nemec

I’m always brainstorming ideas for the newsletter & most of them require some more detailed research to really do it justice. Finding the time for that gets tough when I’m in the weeds of tracking games, so what I’m going to do this week is talk about which games I reviewed and what stood out to me. Sometimes it’s recent games, other times it’s me catching up on the full season for one time. This week it was a lot of Colorado games & there is no shortage of things to talk about with the Avs. The best team in the league right now and certainly the most exciting.

Oddly enough, a few of the games I reviewed this week were losses, I’m not going to breakdown the one to Boston because that’s old news but I did want to spend some time on the Sharks game from last Saturday. On the surface, it’s a pretty standard “goalie win” with the Avs outchancing San Jose 22-9, dominating the xG battle 2.47-0.76 according to Natural Stat Trick and losing in overtime. The story to me from this game was the Sharks having a couple of guys hang with the Avalanche’s top guns.

If you’ve followed my Game Score charts for Colorado, Nathan MacKinnon and Martin Necas usually look like AFI’s Spotify stats where Miss Murder & Girls Not Grey have a major lead over everyone else. They do all the things that get rewarded by the A3Z stats, controlled entries, leading chances off said entries, creating scoring chances, setting up shots, controlled exits, high danger passes. They’re two of the best players in the game right now at this & have wonderful chemistry. The interesting note here is that this was one of the lower output games of the season, as both have averaged a Game Score above 2 this year (which is insane btw) and they were held to 1.75 and 1.35 for Necas and MacKinnon respectively. Still very good, but somewhat surprising in a game where you won the scoring chance battle by 11 at five-on-five.

They didn’t runaway with the individual impact stats and who is right behind them? Macklin Celebrini. It’s a little jarring to see because the Sharks have been one of the punching bags of the West for years and even when they had good players there, it was rare for them to have someone stack up against the league’s elites. What might be more impressive is they kept the Avs top guys from running amok on them, although their depth took a beating at five-on-five.

The hype around Celebrini is well-deserved, producing like a star at only 19. Some have been quick to point out that the Sharks are also scoring on almost 20% of their shots with him on the ice, which is obviously unsustainable but the larger point I want to touch on is how he’s become somewhat of a lifeline for the Sharks in games where they’re outmatched. This wasn’t even his most impressive game this week (his line’s performance against Winnipeg was next level), but given the quality of opponent and how badly the rest of the team got caved in, I came away super impressed with Celebrini this game. He didn’t dominate every shift, but sometimes you have to tread water & make impactful plays when they’re open. In this game he had five shots, three scoring chances, one setup, five controlled entries and three controlled exits.