Breaking down the Numbers: Penguins vs. Coyotes

After a quiet trade deadline for the day for the Penguins for the most part, they got ready to square off against the Arizona Coyotes, who gave them all kind of fits very early in the season when the two teams played in Glendale.

This game was just a little bit of the opposite.

Lines and Pairings

Let's Go Pens! pic.twitter.com/1WErT0xtb7

— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) February 29, 2016

Kevin Porter drew in for Conor Sheary, who is injured. I wouldn't expect him to last there long, but who knows.

Highlights

Positives

The score was 6-0. This is a positive. Hot take alert.

Hatric Hornqvist. Fantastic game from Patric Hornqvist, getting his first career hat trick, after I believe reading 18 games with two goals, but never able to pot the third. He worked his ass off for the first goal.

Who said Penguins can't fly... straight onto the ice for a hat trick? pic.twitter.com/89GFmOmgw7

— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) March 1, 2016

Derrick Pouliot continues to shine. He's not making any flashy plays, but he's using his primary skill set, being his skating, to help him. And the numbers reflect well. He's putting up very good numbers on the third pairing right now.

Power play looked great at times. Nice to see that.

The Penguins weren't content with 6-0. And their reasoning was because they weren't playing the right way to close out the game. That is fantastic.

Letang: "Fun at the beginning, but you see at the end you start going away from what you're successful at. In that regard, I don't like it."

— Angie (@acarducci) March 1, 2016

Yes, he may be a lunatic at times and snap out, but Kris Letang has stepped up big time in terms of leadership on this team.

Sergei Plotnikov. After being traded across the arena earlier in the day, he suited up against the Penguins....and did nothing, just like he had all season. And to put the cherry on top, he took a dumb penalty like we were used to seeing him do.

Negatives

Uh, it was 6-0. No complaints.

The crossbar. It was Marc-Andre Fleury's BFF multiple times.

Stats

	Coyotes	Penguins
Goals	0	6 (Hornqvist, Hornqvist, Kunitz, Hornqvist, Letang, Cullen)
Shots on Goal	30	33
5v5 Corsi For Percentage	48.2%	51.8%

Analytics

Nice to see the Penguins just keep working into the second period after their little flat-line in the first. It felt like smooth sailing after it was 4-0. I legitimately started feeling bad for Louis Domingue. Especially on the sixth goal that Matt Cullen scored. A friend of mine who wishes to remain nameless said it very eloquently:

"That Cullen goal might be one of the saddest things I've ever seen in professional hockey. Like, it seemed like Placido Domingo just quit life and didn't care about anything. It was as though he went for a jar on a high shelf, bobbled it, and then tried to recover and ended up dropping the jar of pickles. Now he's got bleeding feet from the broken glass, his house smells of pickle brine, and his lunch has been ruined."

Even Strength Shot Attempts

So, I guess whoever came up with that mantra of 'go to the net and good things will happen' wasn't just full of shit. This is fantastic to see.

Power Play Shot Attempts

Good stuff on both sides of the special teams units for the Penguins. Blocking 5 of the 11 shot attempts for the Coyotes on the PP makes life a bit easier for the goaltender. On the PP for the Penguins, they passed the puck waaaaay too much last night, but when you score 5 goals at EV, it's hard to complain about the special teams unit.

Shot attempt charts provided by War on Ice.

Expected Goals

Yeah, baby. This is the good shit.

A refresher of the key for these charts:

More information and description/analysis of Expected Goals can be found here on Hockey Graphs.

In the previous post here using these charts for the first time, I mentioned how it factors in things like shot quality. A more detailed list of what factors into that shot quality is below:

Expected Goals map provided by Don't Tell Me About Heart.

Head-to-Head Shot Attempts

My word, the Stone/OEL pairing just got pushed around, and the Connauton/Murphy pairing did very well. Crazy how that works. Not a good night for Daley/Dumoulin, but Letang and Maatta were aces.

A basic description on how to read these charts: Cross reference a player from each team, and that box shows how many shot attempts each team had while those two players shared ice time. The + and - are from the home team's perspective.

For a refresher on how to read these charts, a write-up with descriptions of what colors mean, which lines to read, and more: H2H Corsi Chart Primer

H2H Chart via Muneeb Alam from Japers' Rink

Individual Shot Attempts

The Penguins managed to make life difficult for OEL, and that's always a good thing when you play the Coyotes.

Individual Shot Attempts Charts via War on Ice

When Kris Letang goes into beast mode, it's a sight to see. I love it.

Ice-time vs. Possession Charts via Sean Tierney

Line-by-Line Shot Attempts

You know it's a good night for you when your third line has the best possession metrics on the team.

Not a good night at all for Dumo/Daley, but they were kinda due for a rough night, and picking a 6-0 game to have a bad night seems like an okay thing, at least in my opinion.

Line-by-line data via Hockey Stats

Up next tonight, a re-scheduled game against the Washington Capitals. Could be a very fun one, and we might see Matt Murray in goal tonight.