One of my favourite things about using the Ice Tilt metric from NHL EDGE IQ powered by AWS is that you can be sure it tells a story. Now, what story exactly can require some context, and the Western Conference Final is a great example of what I’m talking about here. When you tease apart a few different factors, Ice Tilt reveals which teams are really in charge out there.
To zoom out for a second before we go into the series: Ice Tilt is just an average of where the 12 skaters are on the ice at any given time (using rolling two-minute chunks to keep the charts from being excessively chaotic). One thing I’ve noticed is teams that are trailing in the third period tend to control the total Tilt for the game, usually due to their command in the final frame. That’s simply “score effects,” and is why we’ve so often dialled back the use of Tilt to evaluating just the first two periods.
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No long-time hockey fan would flinch at the implication that the score impacts the location of play in the third period. We know intuitively that teams who are leading don’t want to take unnecessary offensive risks that could expose them the other way, so they tend to back off in what may be 50/50 “pinch or don’t pinch” situations. Combine that with the extra push of desperation you get from teams trailing in the third period (as well as coaches loading up ice time on their best offensive players), and losing teams are often in the offensive zone in the third period.
As a result, third periods tend to lead the way when it comes to dissecting the question “In which periods did a team have the most Ice Tilt?” Check this out: here are the periods with the most Tilt through playoffs. As you can see, third periods predominantly have the highest totals.
So let’s check in on the Stars-Oilers series. As you can see, in each of the first three games the losing team controlled the third period tilt (that would be just the red part of these bars). Dallas won Game 1, and the Oilers won Games 2 and 3.
But over the course of this series, the Oilers have been finding their defensive structure in a way that seems to increasingly frustrate the Stars, to the point where this is what the third period of Game 4 looked like:
For the first time in the series it was the winning team that controlled third period tilt.
Here’s how that shook out minute by minute in what we’re calling a “heartbeat” graph. You can see in the third period of Game 4 that the Stars just weren’t able to push the play towards Edmonton’s end.
As a result, the Stars ended up with a measly four shots in the third, while the Oilers racked up 13.
That particular detail – the low amount of shots from Dallas – also speaks to how effective Edmonton has been at forcing the Stars’ opportunities off the net. Throughout this series, the Stars have had their shot attempts either miss the net or get blocked a whopping 59 per cent of the time. (The Oilers have seen 52 per cent of their attempts missed or blocked in the series.)
Just a fun little detail I came across with my collaborating partner Brant Berglund while doing research for these observations:
During the regular season, about 51.4 per cent of shots (from 60 feet and in) either miss the net or get blocked. In the first round, it’s 55.5 per cent. In the second and third rounds, that percentage climbs to between 57 and 58 per cent. In sum, it gets harder as defences get better and more desperate, and the Oilers are doing a tremendous job of keeping the Stars from getting pucks through.
That the Stars struggled to get shot attempts on net (managing just four in the third of the series’ most pivotal game while trailing) speaks to a bleak reality for Dallas: they just don’t have any answers. There’s no secrets left in the playbook. They finished the NHL’s regular season third in scoring, they added Mikko Rantanen to that lineup for the final month, and they can’t get a sniff when they need it most, having scored just twice over the past three games. As noted, they couldn’t even generate a score effects push, and that was when the Oilers were without both Zach Hyman and Mattias Ekholm.
It’s not impossible that the Stars can figure out some way to get through the Oilers great structure in Game 5, but it sure seems like at this point Edmonton has the answers. If Dallas hopes for a better result next game – let alone in this series – they’re going to have to start with finding a way to control the play more, and from there, get more pucks through and on to Stuart Skinner.
