The Paper Feature is a weekly column and sidebars that appears in the Vancouver Courier newspaper. Track it down!
In general, hockey fans love results. They love to see a big goal, big save, or a big win. They’re a lot less concerned with how the team got to that goal, save, or win.
In general, hockey coaches love process. They focus on all the details of the game, from systems to board battles and everything in between. They have to. If they don’t focus on process, the results will never come.
Right away, there is going to be a gap between coaches and fans, who, at a base level, care about different things.
This isn’t a hard and fast divide, by any means. Coaches want to win and a lack of results generally ends up changing the process and there are plenty of fans with backgrounds in hockey that can appreciate the process as much as the end result.
But that gap is there and it becomes readily apparent when you look at Jake Virtanen this season.
Virtanen’s ice time has been a major talking point, as he’s averaging less than ten minutes per game, the lowest on the Canucks. This is frustrating for a lot of fans, as he’s putting up good results given his ice time: he’s fifth on the team in goals and points per hour and leading in shots per hour. Given more ice time, the reasoning goes, Virtanen would put up even better results.
But there’s something about Virtanen’s process that the coaching staff doesn’t seem to like and he knows it. In interviews, he’s always identifying some element that he needs to focus on, whether it’s being stronger on the walls, finishing his checks, or improving his consistency.
Here’s the issue: whatever he might be doing wrong when it comes to those details, it’s not showing up in his results. Whether you just look at goals against or delve into shot attempts and scoring chances, Virtanen looks fantastic.
Only two Canucks forwards are on the ice for a lower-rate of shots against than Virtanen: the Sedins. No one has been on the ice for a lower-rate of goals against: he leads the team with just 1.48 goals against per hour of ice time. So whatever issues he might have, they’re not costing the Canucks defensively on the scoresheet.
In fact, Virtanen is one of the Canucks’ best players when it comes to shot attempt differential: only the Sedins are better. When Virtanen is on the ice, the Canucks significantly out-shoot their opposition. With those kinds of results, it seems obvious that Virtanen should get more ice time.
Some might argue that most of Virtanen’s shots come from the outside, where they’re less dangerous, but the Canucks as a whole get plenty of shots from great scoring areas when he’s on the ice.
A heat map of the Canucks’ unblocked shot attempts at 5-on-5 with Virtanen on the ice from hockeyviz.com shows that the Canucks get a significantly higher-than-average number of shot attempts from the slot and the left side of the net. This is partly because Virtanen creates rebound chances for his linemates, leading the team in rebound rate according to NaturalStatTrick.com.
So where is the disconnect between Virtanen’s process and his results? If the details of his game need enough work that he’s averaging under 10 minutes per game, why are the Canucks performing so well when he’s on the ice?
Stick-taps and Glove-drops
Stick-tap to Roberto Luongo for winning his 200th game with the Florida Panthers, becoming only the second goaltender in NHL history to win 200 games for two different franchises.
Dropping the gloves with Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Matt Murray. After facing the Canucks last week, he dismissed the bulk of their goals as weird bounces. That wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t dismissed Brock Boeser’s hat trick against him earlier in the season with the same phrase: “weird bounces.” Murray’s insistence that the goals against him were just lucky led to a lot of blowback on social media.
Big Numbers
1000 - Congratulations to Daniel Sedin for reaching 1000 career points with his three-point performance against the Nashville Predators. It’s an incredible accomplishment, as he becomes just the 87th player in NHL history to reach the milestone.
19 - In the wake of multiple injuries to the Canucks, Nikolay Goldobin got called up from the Utica Comets this past week. He had 7 goals and 19 points in 18 games before the call-up, leading the Comets in scoring. After a couple games in the press box, he finally got into the lineup, and immediately tallied an assist while playing on the top line with Bo Horvat and Brock Boeser.
