I was just as shocked as anyone to see that the Jamie McBain-Tim Gleason defense pairing was kept together in Thursday night's game against the Canucks because of how poorly those two played as a unit until then. While they had a respectable outing that game, I thought Kirk Muller would have decided to reunite Bryan Allen and Tim Gleason since they were going up against a strong offensive team and McBain has struggled in a shutdown role thus far. That's when I began to thought to myself the negatives of the Allen-Gleason defense pairing. Both guys are studs in their own zone and the best defensemen on the team in terms of preventing chances against but neither are that good of puck movers.

There is a lot of pressure put on defensemen to get the puck out of their own zone with break-out passes that you need to have a puck-moving defenseman on almost any pairing. One of McBain's strengths is being able to move the puck well and with Joni Pitkanen on the shelf indefinitely, that makes him an attractable option for the top pairing. Allen and Gleason, on the other hand, are not known for their puck-moving skills but are both so bad that they can't play on the top pairing?

This is where looking at zone entries and exits will come in handy. Derek Zona of Copper and Blue looked at this for the Oilers and the folks at Broad Street Hockey have been tracking zone entries for the Flyers all season. The latter part is what we're the most concerned with here because having a defenseman that can get the puck out of the zone is crucial for establishing any kind of offense. To compare McBain and Allen's puck moving skills, I watched each of their shifts from the last game they played on a pairing with Gleason (Thursday vs. Canucks for McBain and Nov. 26th vs. Florida for Allen), recorded what happened each time they touched the puck in the defensive zone and logged how they advanced the puck. Did they make an outlet pass to a forward in the neutral zone, rely one of the forwards to exit the zone, make a big slap pass around the boards and hope for the best or do it the old fashioned way and exit the zone themselves?

Find out the answer after the jump

All season long, the one thing that's been frustrating Canes fans the most (myself included) is how some of the team's best prospects were being restricted to fourth line minutes but it appears that is about to change under Kirk Muller. With Jeff Skinner out, that leaves a huge hole to fill in the top-nine but it also creates an opportunity for one of the younger players to assume a bigger role and they might be able to stick around in Raleigh if they make the most of their playing time. 2008's third round pick Drayson Bowman got his chance last night and he certainly took advantage of it. Scored two goals and was one of the team's most effective offensive players in route to a 4-3 win over the Vancouver Canucks. 

That's not the only thing we can talk about in this game, though. There was the team's powerplay having a very successful night, Cam Ward's terrific play and the second line coming to life. We'll get into all of that after the jump.

Vancouver Canucks (18-10-2) at Carolina Hurricanes (9-18-5)
7:00 p.m., RBC Center
TV: FS-Carolinas, Sportsnet-Vancouver

It's unknown that all general managers look at all of these advanced stats that are gaining popularity on the Internet, but I suspect that Mike Gillis of the Vancouver Canucks might be one of them. He's made some very good trades over the past year where the Canucks acquired a low-PDO player for not much of a cost. The most recent one being the trade for David Booth in exchange for Marco Sturm and Mikael Samuelsson. Booth is a very talented player who hasn't been getting any luck the last two seasons with Florida (PDO is 934 this year), and Gillis was able to take advantage of Dale Tallon "selling low" on him and was able to snag a top-six forward for two expiring contracts.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more GM's do something similar and the Hurricanes are in a position where another team can take advantage of them via trade or vice versa. With the chances of a playoff birth being all but done, it's all about rebuilding now and there's a few under and over acheiving players who may be dealt this year. Will Jim Rutherford be able to get more or less value for the players he trades this year? We'll see. He was able to turn Sergei Samsonov's expiring contract into Bryan Allen, who has been the team's best defenseman last year so I have faith.

This is related because Carolina's game tonight is against Gillis' Canucks and it has the potential to be very ugly for us. I do have some faith because Carolina has played some of their better games this year against good teams. They do own victories over Chicago, Pittsburgh and Boston so I wouldn't get too pessimistic. The absence of our leading goal scorer and one of our best defenseman will make things very difficult, though.

Lines, analysis & more after the jump

The Carolina Hurricanes were hit hard with injuries the past week as it was announced last night that both Joni Pitkanen and Jeff Skinner will be out indefinitely after sustaining concussions. I don't even need to tell you how critical of a loss Jeff Skinner is, so I'll save the statistical mumbo jumbo for him. However, I do want to touch on how the injury to Joni Pitkanen will effect the defense. He's missed about 10 games already and has been such a key piece to the defense that things tend to get shaken up a lot during that time. That's certainly been the case this season as the Canes have gone through about 30 different defense combinations this year and the only two consistent pairings were Pitkanen/McBain and Allen/Gleason. Tomas Kaberle and Jay Harrison was the only other defense pairing that had a long tenure and that's obviously defunct now. The constant mix-and-matching on the blue-line has been going on all season but it always seems to increase a ton whenever Pitkanen is out of the lineup. He always logs a ton of minutes and is playing TOUGH situations this year, so that's understandable. After the jump, we'll take a look at how Carolina's defense pairings have played this year and some possible solutions as to what the team can do while #25 is on the IR.

Before his terrific performance against the Leafs last night, Cam Ward was one of the main frustrations with this Hurricanes team as he's clearly played below his standards this year. Ward has been Carolina's back-stop ever since he took them to the Cup in 2005-06 and has been performing at a high level for the past three years (EV Sv% <.920 during that time). This year, however, he's taken a sharp turn downward with his even strength and overall save percentages being way below the league average. He's beginning to show frustrations with both his play and, to some extent, the team around him. So who is to blame for Ward's struggles? Is the defense in front of him making his job harder or is the problem with Ward centered around himself? We'll explore this after the jump.

One of the ongoing stories for this season is how the Hurricanes goaltending, specifically Cam Ward, has not been nearly good enough this season. Going into tonight, Ward had a sub-.900 save percentage, an even strength save percentage that's way below the league average and only one quality outing in his last seven games. Last season, he was the main reason why this team was so close to making the playoffs and this year he's been a part of the numerous problems with this team. 

Tonight's game against Toronto was a different story as he put together his best performance in over a month with 36 saves on 38 shots in a game which the Canes had no business being in. He may have taken the 2-1 overtime loss on a leaky goal, but if it wasn't for him, Carolina wouldn't have even gotten a point tonight. The Canes created only five total chances at even strength and were outplayed by the Leafs from the opening whistle but Ward was able to stand on his head and look more like the goaltender we're used to seeing. He was at his best while the rest of the team was not.

Scoring chances & more after the jump

Carolina Hurricanes (9-18-4) at Toronto Maple Leafs (15-11-3)
7:00 p.m., Air Canada Centre
TV: FS-Carolinas, SportsNet-Ontario

One phrase people love to throw around when things get tough is "at least it can't get any worse." Well, for the Carolina Hurricanes it can. We have one of the worst records in the NHL, injuries all over our defense, an ineffective powerplay and most of our losses have been by at least three goals. It was after the Winnipeg game that I said "Hey, at least things can't get worse." What happens after that? Jeff Skinner misses another with what is being described as an "undisclosed injury" and I'm hearing that it could be a concussion. So no, I don't want to hear that "things can't get worse" because when you have that mindset, they do get worse. Or maybe I'm just superstitious and want this Canada road trip to end? Probably that. Anyway, the good news is that this is the last game of the road trip and the Canes are taking on a team they beat a month ago, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Lines, analysis & more after the jump

One of the features on this blog is the weekly rundown of the Hurricanes performance and at the beginning I present a graph called an "OZ Coke Chart" which is a graph that shows how each player on the team is being used. It plots a player's offensive zone starts on the x-axis agianst his corsi relative to quality of competition (corsi rel QoC) on the y-axis to show how tough his assignments are. A player with a high corsi rel. QoC and low percentage of offensive zone starts are usually shutdown defensemen or defensive forwards capable of playing well against the opposition's top players. On the other end, players that are given a higher percentage of offensive zone starts and are placed against average to bad competition are those who coaches do not trust defensively and shelter them as a result. The idea comes from Rob Vollman at Hockey Prospectus and is being used by many different team bloggers including the Flyers, Flames, Stars, Capitals and Blue Jackets.

I've been monitoring this for the Hurricanes all season and figured it would be a cool idea to see how other Southeast coaches are using their players. I did make one extra addition with this, though. To show how each player is performing, I used a bubble graph and color coded the bubbles to show if a player has a positive (blue) or negative (red) corsi relative rating. This will help display how well a player is driving possession in his role. The bubbles also increase or decrease in size depending on what his corsi relative rating is. If he's positive and has a big bubble, then he's killing it territorially. If he's negative and has a big bubble, then he's getting dominated. Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not, because we haven't gotten to the good stuff yet. That comes after the jump.

What do we make of the past week for the Carolina Hurricanes? They got their first win under Kirk Muller by defeating the Oilers in dominant fashion, but they also had two stinkers against Calgary and Winnipeg. I mean, they were only outscored 13-14 and outshot 92-97 so how bad could they have played? Well, the data is skewed a bit from that Oilers game because if you eliminate that, then the Canes were outshot and outscored by a much bigger margin. Also, their performance at even strength was a mixed bag. They controlled only 46.8% of the shots five-on-five but had the advantage in scoring chances by owning 52.5% of those, but I'm willing to bet that most of it is from the Oilers game and when they were playing catch-up to the Flames on Tuesday. Goaltending brought this team down for the second week in a row as Cam Ward was pulled twice and stopped only 86.5% of the shots he faced. Not even close to being "good enough." It's been a weakness for this team all year and it hasn't been improving.

I breakdown the past week for the Canes after the jump

One thing statisticians love to throw around is how "x player is on pace for y amount of points" whenever they are on a hot or cold streak. Take Jiri Tlusty for instance, he's off to a pretty strong start by his standards with six goals and 11 points in 31 games. He is currently on pace for 16 goals and 29 points if he plays all 82 games, which would be career highs for him. Is it possible that he keeps up that pace? Sure, but it's equally likely that he won't because things like injuries, slumps, hot streaks, etc can happen at any time and change a player's goals and points per game rate. Actually, a player's "scoring pace" changes just about every game when you think about it, which is why I thought it would be a fun idea to look at every regular forward on the Canes, see what their pace is and whether they'll finish above or below that mark. We'll start this after the jump.