Sleeksays

Anaheim Ducks (14-8-3, 3rd in west) at Detroit Red Wings (15-4-4, 2nd in west) Battle of the Hangovers For today's post I threw together a comparison table looking at how the Ducks and Red Wings have been performing compared to a specific stretch of games last season. For the Ducks, the selected stretches have been hand-picked from each season: 07-08: the first 19 games after Scott Niedermayer returned to the lineup. 08-09: the most recent 19 games (excluding the 1-5-0 first six games) . I decided to stick to stretches where the Ducks have been performing well points-wise. In the 07-08 stretch, the Ducks went 12-5-2; in the 08-09 stretch the Ducks went 13-3-3. For the Red Wings, the selection is much more straightforward: 07-08: the first 23 games of the season. 08-09: the first 23 games of the season. This one's much more obvious: I'm just looking at how Detroit's "hangover" start (15-4-4) compares to its season start from last year (15-6-2) . Now I don...

As the Sharks have racked up points to start this season, I've had my attention fixed on where they'd sit after the sixteen game mark. Why sixteen games, you ask? For one, it does represent the first 20% of the season, but more importantly, it's where I mentally set the bar two years ago when the Ducks finally suffered a regulation loss in Game 17. This originally was going to be a comparison of just the 06-07 Ducks and the 08-09 Sharks, but since I started mulling the idea I've been reminded that it's not just the Ducks that started their season on fire en route to a Stanley Cup. Here's a look at the last four cup winners have performed in their (mostly) first sixteen games, with the Sharks thrown in for comparison. In the right-hand column I have included each team's record through 60 minutes -- probably more indicative of projected postseason play. Overall Records: Team Raw Record GF � GA = GD PP PK Regulation Record 03-04 Lightning * 11-2-2-1, 25 pts 0...

Anaheim Ducks (7-5-1, t-3rd in west) at Los Angeles Kings (3-6-1, 15th in west) Let's try this again, shall we? Lots to talk about on the Anaheim end of things, plus I'm sure Rudy's got plenty of Kings stuff to add, so let's get moving. First off is the Six Games of Jekyll / Seven Games of Hyde that's started off the Ducks' year. 1-5-0 in the first six, then 6-0-1 in the last seven, and the primary difference appears to be offense: the Ducks jumped from 2.17 goals scored per game to 4.14, and the power play jumped from a 1-for-24 success ratio to a 10-for-30 over the last seven games. Meanwhile, defense and penalty killing for the Ducks have stayed remarkably consistent (goals-against per game went from 3.33 to 3.29; penalty killing went from 80.6% to 80.5%) . As noted, the primary driver for this improved offense has been the awakening of the three-headed first star of the week : Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, and Teemu Selanne. The table below shows the improve...

Vancouver Canucks (5-5-0, t-7th in west) at Anaheim Ducks (6-5-0, 5th in west) Trick or treat? Teemu takes Trick. Sorry this gameday post was so late in coming, but I was under the assumption that the NHL was going to suspend all regular season games until its posterchild Sid Crosby recovered from his mystery injury. Whoops! At any rate, because I was so bored at work today I thought I'd revisit an old study I did about the success of teams visiting SoCal to play both the Kings and the Ducks. In the table below, I've pooled together all the instances since the lockout when a visiting team played at the Honda Center and the Staples Center within two days of each other, then separated the results according to (a) which arena they visited first, and (b) how many days separated the games. Keep in mind, this table shows visiting opponent results, not the results for the home teams: (click image to enlarge) There's a lot of data thrown in this table (and sorry for the shoddy ...

I guess it was a result of reading USA Today too often, but I always wanted pie chart functionality on my blog. I will break down a few of the recent scoring trends for San Jose on Sharkspage soon. I was going to try to project the largest number of 20 goal scorers for the Sharks in a few years, but as has happened often when I delve into the numbers it usually disproves the point I am actually trying to make. There is no live broadcast of Dan Boyle's return to Tampa Bay tonight on Comcast Sportsnet Bay Area . There will be a broadcast of the game on the NHL Network (as reported on the Sharks-Florida broadcast last night, my cable guide shows Northern Michigan at Michigan State tonight at 4PM), and Sharks radio play-by-play host Dan Rusanowski breaks down a plethora of radio options for tonights game here . If you want to go off the board for your hockey viewing today try Yahoo Streaming (Pittsburgh vs New York Rangers), hockeywebcasts.com (Ottawa @ Toronto, Anaheim @ Montreal...

The Sharks 5-4 overtime win on Saturday night was an entertaining affair, with new defenseman Dan Boyle contributing to the game tying and game winning goals respectively. It was Boyle who fired 2 of the Sharks 5 shots in an earlier 5-on-3 man advantage, Boyle who split 2 Flyers and pulled up in front of a third to create the game tying goal sequence, and it was Boyle who drove the net in overtime and hammered home a hard feed from Thornton to give the Sharks a win and a 5-1 start on the season. The Flyers are a bit of a conundrum at this point. They have some injuries on defense, and they brought in a hulking Andrew Alberts from Boston who took a number of shifts, but they had more than enough opportunities to lock down a difficult road win. Instead they opted to go eye-for-eye, check-for-check with San Jose and they got burned. The physical element to the game kicked off early in the first period when defenseman Rob Blake checked Scott Hartnell hard into the post. It was a clean pla...

Anaheim Ducks (0-2-0, last in west) at Los Angeles Kings (0-2-0, last in west) Battle of the Basement Sorry I've been a bit invisible the last couple of days; I've been steering clear of the blog, mainly because of the frustrating play of the Anaheim Ducks. It's not just that they're 0-2 that bothers me (only once in franchise history have the Ducks started 2-0) , but it's the manner in which games are being lost that really sucks. It's a pattern that dates back to the Dallas series last spring, and I've put a table together that lists the last seven times an opponent has broken a tie against the Ducks. All seven times the Ducks also allowed the next goal for a 2-goal deficit, and in six of seven times the lead was extended to 3 goals, on average less than 20 minutes later. Game Time Elapsed Until Deficit Extends to 2 Time Elapsed Until Deficit Extends to 3 G1 v DAL 6:09 12:33 G2 v DAL 15:00 G2 v DAL 0:55 8:49 G4 @ DAL 32:22 40:38 G6 @ DAL 15:32 17:46 G1 ...

Nothing too new in this post, but I figured I'd make a quick chart to show the parallel paths between the Anaheim Ducks and the San Jose Sharks since the lockout. I normally would have put this in tomorrow's game day post, but we've got other plans afoot (I know, wtf? Plans and BoC? Crazy) . I didn't label the x-axis, but it would number 1-82 three times across this chart, for the three seasons played since the lockout. As noted below the chart, the red line represents the difference in the three year cumulative points total; the blue line resets at zero at the start of each new regular season. Red line = cumulative point total difference since the lockout Blue line = resets at zero at the start of each season There's not too much to take away from this chart, other than what Ducks fans and Sharks fans have known for a while -- it's been damn tough for one of these teams to pull too far away from the other. In 2005-06, both teams stayed neck-and-neck throughout ...