Sharks vs. Red Wings: By the numbers

• If you were wondering who the coaching staff would use as their shutdown pair on the Sharks' revamped defense, this game provided some answers. Brad Stuart and Jason Demers started just one of their shifts in the offensive zone and ten in their own end of the rink while playing the heaviest minutes against both Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. They fared extremely well considering the circumstances, only getting outchanced by a pair in twenty minutes of even-strength ice time.
• While they weren't creating breakaways on every other shift as they did against the Getzlaf line the previous night, Marleau/Couture/Wingels played a whale of a game against Datsyuk, inauspicious birthday presents aside. While that line allowed 19 Wings shot attempts against, only one came from the scoring area largely because they managed to block 9 of them. Looks like the Sharks really miss the veteran shot-blocking prowess of Handzus, Burish and Murray.
• Despite the Burns goal, this was a pretty disappointing performance by the top line. I follow hockey pretty closely yet only have the vaguest idea of who Joakim Andersson is; that's the center Joe Thornton was matched up against for the majority of the night as Todd McLellan (as he insinuated in a post-game press conference) now has the advantage of feeding Havlat/Thornton/Burns some fairly soft minutes. Getting outshot and outchanced in those minutes presumably wasn't part of the plan but, hey, at least they didn't get outscored.
• It's nice to see Joe Pavelski finally getting the bounces as he was still largely his usual effective two-way self during that scoring slump that some made a big deal of. He was fantastic through two periods in this one, with a +6 shot attempt differential while hard-matched against Zetterberg, before the Sharks really shut things down following the Burns goal.
• By all accounts, he seems like a great dude but Adam Burish was barely an NHL-caliber player for the Sharks. At least based on the early returns of chaining him to the press box, it seems fairly obvious that he was the boat anchor on that fourth line who ate their Detroit counterpart alive in this one./

For more information on what these numbers mean, head here for an in-depth explanation of Corsi and here for more details on scoring chances.