The Minnesota Wild are in a 3-1 hole in their Western Conference quarterfinal against the Winnipeg Jets. This is after the Wild lost Game 4 at home on Tuesday, 2-0.
The obvious problem with the Wild’s coach saying a missed call vs. the Jets ‘cost us the game’
Let’s do some arithmetic for Bruce Boudreau.
Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images
Let’s repeat that score, because it’s important:
Jets 2, Wild 0 (zero).
That makes this point by Wild coach Bruce Boudreau a bit suspect:
Here’s what Boudreau’s referring to — an egregious missed call by the game’s referees while the Wild were on a 5-on-4 power play, trying to get on the board in the first period:
The call wasn’t made. The Jets’ Mark Schiefle scored a couple of moments later to make it 1-0, and Winnipeg never relinquished that lead.
In a vacuum, there’s nothing wrong with Boudreau’s anger. This is clearly a penalty, whether the refs would’ve chosen to call it cross-checking, roughing, interference, or whatever. Winnipeg defenseman Josh Morrissey shoved his stick into the side of Eric Staal’s head while Staal didn’t have the puck, making it an extra illegal play. Boudreau is also on the right track that hockey refs sometimes let penalties go when they’d create a lopsided power play.
The problem, of course, is that the Wild scored zero goals, so it’s a hard sell that the denial of a five-on-three power play chance cost them the game.
The Wild were 2-of-7 on five-on-threes during the regular season. That’s a 28.6 percent success rate, up from their usual five-on-four conversation rate of 20.1 percent. This is only an estimation, but the Wild lost about an 8 percent better chance of scoring a goal in a game they ultimately lost 1-0, not counting a late empty-netter by Schiefle.
Maybe Boudreau’s right, and maybe the Wild would’ve scored on the two-man advantage, and then maybe Schiefle wouldn’t have gotten the chance to put Winnipeg up 1-0, and then maybe everything would’ve unfolded perfectly for the Wild to win. Morrissey did get an assist on the first goal, and maybe he should’ve been in the penalty box or out of the game, and maybe nobody else would’ve set up any Jets goals the rest of the way.
Or maybe the Wild would’ve lost anyway, because they scored zero goals, and the only way you can win with zero goals is if the other team scores negatives, and that’s impossible. It’s not the best practice to blame losses on the refs when you score zero (0) goals.
This has been an advanced thesis on hockey analytics. Thank you for following along.
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