Scoring Chances: Game 8 vs. Detroit

Complete scoring chance summary

On-ice scoring chances for and against

Team scoring chance totals

Head-to-head scoring chances

• With their top defense pairing out of the lineup, the Red Wings weren’t necessarily interested in taking chances offensively. With Brent Burns and Dan Boyle out of the lineup, the Sharks weren’t exactly capable of doing so even if they had wanted to. The result was perhaps the most boring Sharks vs. Red Wings game in recent memory with the teams splitting just 18 total chances by my count.
• Given that Detroit’s bottom six was no great shake, I wonder if the Sharks would have had more success generating offense had they loaded up their top six last night by moving Joe Pavelski into Freddie Hamilton’s spot on the Thornton line. Especially considering the Pavelski line had their lunch pretty well eaten by the Cleary/Weiss/Tatar combination for the Red Wings anyway.
• Just in terms of the difficulty of his assignment, the uneven play of forwards in front of him and the sheer number of hot water situations he single-handedly got the Sharks out of, I think this might have been one of Marc-Edouard Vlasic’s best games of the season so far, which is saying something considering how incredible he’s been out of the gate. Big ups to his partner Justin Braun, too, who had one shift in particular where he effectively mirrored Henrik Zetterberg throughout the Sharks’ end before stripping him of the puck and clearing the zone.
• On the flip side was Brad Stuart, who just had a brutal game in his return to Motown. Despite starting a greater percentage of his shifts in the offensive zone than any other Shark and drawing Detroit’s fourth line more often than any other matchup, he was smoked in scoring chance and shot attempt differential. Stuart really isn’t capable of logging top-four minutes anymore but obviously the solution isn’t icing a Hannan/Stuart third pairing either. If Dan Boyle is out for an extended stretch, and it seems like that might be the case, I think the Sharks would be wise to call up Matt Tennyson. I’d be surprised if he’s worse than some of their current options and he’s certainly a closer approximation of Boyle’s skillset than Stuart or Hannan.