The New York Rangers seemingly turned a corner the past few games, initiating more offense and not spending as much time pinned in their own zone defensively. It’s a big reason why the Rangers had a three-game winning streak earlier this week.
That all changed Thursday night against the Calgary Flames, when they allowed a season-high 49 shots on goal and were out-attempted by a whopping 90-53 in a 3-2 road loss.
So just how bad was this game when taking a look at all of the underlying numbers?
The Rangers allowed 5.47 expected goals (xG), according to Natural Stat Trick. That was the second most they’ve allowed this season, behind only their 5-3 loss to the Washington Capitals on Oct. 29. In that game they allowed a whopping 8.97 xG, which is actually the most any team has allowed all season. The Blueshirts were only able to generate 2.42 xG themselves, for just a 30.66 percent share overall.
On Thursday, the worst period for the Rangers was the first. The discrepancy in xG was 1.45 to 0.23 in favor of Calgary, an 86.2 percent share. The Flames benefited from having the only two power plays in that first period, but only created 0.41 of that xG with the man advantage. It’s clear that the home team came out with the better legs from the start of the game.
“They were better than us in the first.” Peter Laviolette said after the game, pointing out something that was pretty clear for anyone that watched.
New York was able to right the ship in the second period, not only from an underlying numbers perspective, but on the scoreboard as well. After going down 2-0, they scored twice in 16 seconds to tie the game late in the period. The Rangers actually had more expected goals than the Flames in the middle frame, 1.28 to 1.16.
The final period looks more like the first one did. The Rangers started off the period competing and looked like they were going to carry that momentum over from the second period, and got their only power play of the game just 1:03 into the third. They weren’t able to keep this up throughout the period since the xG was 2.85 to 0.91 in favor of Calgary. However, those numbers don’t actually tell the whole story, and the Rangers look better if you look deeper into some other numbers.
Related: 3 takeaways from Rangers’ 3-2 loss to Flames
Rangers’ 5-on-5 play vs Flames better than you might think
As mentioned above, the Rangers only got one power play Thursday Meanwhile the Flames had five. That makes the raw numbers look much worse than they actually were. Calgary had 0.84 of their 5.47 xG with the man advantage, and the Rangers had just 0.24 on their one opportunity. At five-on-five, the 2.69-1.96 Calgary edge was much closer than the total xG differential.
You may notice that the 2.69 xG at five-on-five and 0.84 xG on the power play don’t nearly add up to Calgary’s 5.47 total xG. The gap came from the Flames’ good looks at the end of the game, when the Rangers pulled goalie Igor Shesterkin for the extra attacker. Calgary had several chances to score into the empty net, and created 1.91 xG in the 2:09 when the Rangers played without a goalie. This certainly makes the total xG differential a bit misleading.
Some of the numbers besides expected goals also paint a different picture. The Rangers had the advantage in total high-danger chances, 15-11. In terms of scoring chances, the gap was a narrow 32-29 in the Flames favor. When you look at scoring chances at five-on-five, the Rangers led 26-24. A reason for this could be that the Flames were shooting from mostly non-dangerous areas, as this heat map illustrates.
The Rangers didn’t play up to how they played in the previous few games, and Laviolette said as much postgame.
“I think we played really good games prior to this. We had a bad first period tonight and it ended up costing us”.
In the previous four games, New York had more expected goals than its opponents. That wasn’t the case against the Flames, but the gap that was over three goals doesn’t tell the entire story. The Rangers were at least competitive at five-on-five, and the quality chances were more even, if not better for the Blueshirts.
It’s definitely not what the team wants, but there are reasons to believe that this could be a blip and not yet a concerning trend for the team moving forward.
