“You got to lose to know how to win” -- Aerosmith from ‘Dream On’
There’s not much to analyze here. The Phoenix Coyotes allowed the pace of the game to be dictated and they didn’t have any answer for the onslaught of the Red Wings offensive and defensive mastery in game seven.
In the very least, the Phoenix Coyotes can take the experiences from Game 7 and the series for next season as they had a hell of a 2009-2010 season.
We stated in our pre-game article that one of the keys to victory was for the secondary scoring to step up big time as they would be the key to victory. Well, they did that…..and then some. Just 4:10 into the game Lauri Korpikoski started off the scoring with a game changing short handed goal. From that point on the Red Wings were on their heels and struggling to keep up for the rest of the game.
Add to the mix the Coyotes playing solid defense that was one of their best disciplined performances of the season and you have two of the main keys to victory.
There’s really not much else to tell or analyze here.
Fans saw the Coyotes team that they had been familiar with for the majority of the regular season come out in force for game 6. The Coyotes not only made a statement during the game but also on national TV. The Coyotes performance opened the eyes of a TON of east coast based media that had overwhelmingly picked the Red Wings to dispatch the Coyotes in 6 games or less.
Don’t eat that crow just yet east coast hockey media, I have a feeling that the Coyotes aren’t done yet with the statement making.
I stepped away from the Computer today to get out and about in this beautiful weather but spent some of the time debating how I’m going to handle this article. At times when covering the Coyotes this season with the investment of time one can sometimes lose objectivity allowing the reporter to disappear and the emotional, boisterous hockey fan to appear. This is what happened in Game 5 over the course of the final 30 minutes of the game and had I posted what I was thinking after the game, it wouldn’t have been pretty.
I can sit down here and break down just about every aspect of the game along with what the Coyotes did wrong down to some pretty minute details (as many of you have seen over the course of a season). However, the more I sat back thinking about the game and going over post game comments from both teams, one theme kept coming up again and again that was the reason why the score ended up being 4-1 for the other team.
Mental errors.
It was mental errors that:
- Caused Vernon Fiddler to take not one but two stupid penalties in the first period
- That allowed the Red Wings to take advantage of lapses in the Coyotes defense for all three goals.
- Put the Coyotes in the Penalty Box six times totaling 12 minutes of ice time
The Coyotes are at a point in the series where mental errors like this are unacceptable. The Coyotes cannot afford any more games like this as the Red Wings are the type of team who are patient, methodical and calculating when it comes to finding times to strike offensively. They are extremely experienced in this manner. The Coyotes, as you know are but babes in the woods when it comes to team playoff experience like this.
As an example of this point, I want to show you Coyotes fans what Red Wings Captain Nicklas Lidstrom had to say following game 5:
“…sacrificing ourselves to get the win.”
THIS, was the difference in game 5 and is the difference in the series.
Going into game 6, the Coyotes are going to have to push themselves to the limits not only physically but mentally as well. Anything less? Well, I’d rather not have that enter the realm of possibilities.
As much as I hate to repeat myself this season, wins in the NHL sometimes come down to who makes the fewest mistakes on the ice for any given game. When it came to the three goals the Coyotes allowed against the Detroit Red Wings in game 4, the Coyotes made the most mistakes in their defensive zone.
Two main areas that explain the mistakes the Coyotes made were the mental lapses on defense that allowed all three goals along with stupid, undisciplined penalties by Coyotes players, one of which resulted in a goal for the Red Wings.
I’m just going to show one video from Game 4 that was (and is) an example of how a simple mental lapse on defense can change the course of a game:
How do you allow a player like Pavel Datsyuk to make a gift wrapped, wide open shot like that?!?!?! Credit the Red Wings for doing their homework on the Coyotes and their tendencies to allow open shots their defensive zone.
So how do you explain the lack of offense from the Coyotes?
The Coyotes simply didn’t make the best of the opportunities that were given to them.
Here’s more samples of the Coyotes shooting woes from game 4:
- The seven times when the Red Wings had a player in the penalty box, the Coyotes only managed only 9 shots on goal
- The Coyotes managed only 19 Coyotes shots on goal for the game when playing 5 on 5 hockey.
- On the flip side, when the Wings were playing in situations with a Coyotes player in the box, they generated seven shots on goal on 4 opportunities. One of those shots was a goal. (Since one of these four situations was a co-incidental minor that sent a Coyote and Red Wing player to the box, the Red Wings really had three man advantage situations.)
The Red Wings took advantage of offensive opportunities when they were presented to them. The Coyotes did not.
The Red Wings also played aggressively on both ends of the ice by pressuring the puck carrier in the Coyotes defensive and offensive zones along with crashing the crease around Red Wings goaltender Jimmy Howard (to prevent Coyotes secondary scoring chances). These three items (shots on goal, pressuring the puck carrier, and crashing the crease around Howard) prevented the Coyotes from generating any form of offense.
Here’s an example of the Wings ‘crashing the crease’ around Jimmy Howard. Note how the Wings players descend around their goaltender when a shot on goal is made:
The Coyotes did not have an answer for this.
It’s now a best of three series with the Coyotes holding home ice advantage. This series is the Coyotes for the taking. The entire team has worked extremely hard to get to this point in the playoffs. It’s all up to the Phoenix Coyotes now to decide if they want to move on in the playoffs or not.
Game 3 in the Coyotes/Red Wings series was not only a statement game but a huge character game for the Phoenix Coyotes roster not only after their embarrassing game 2 loss at home but after two key players on their roster went down with undisclosed injuries.
As Coyotes fans who watched the game saw that not only was Vernon Fiddler out of the lineup for the Coyotes, but Captain Shane Doan went down with an undisclosed injury in the second period and never returned (at press time Doan’s status for Game 4 has not been made known).
Normally, the loss of two major pieces to any NHL team’s roster in the post season would crush the morale of most teams. However, the Phoenix Coyotes had gone through situations like this numerous times in the regular season. Once again, Coyotes players stepped up in place of their fallen comrades as they have done so many times this season.
What Coyotes fans didn’t realize or expect was that an entire line would step up and unload an offensive attack that did so much damage the Red Wings did not have an answer. The Czech players on the Coyotes roster exploded for seven points in the game. Five of these points came in the third period as part of a Phoenix Coyotes dominance in front of a national television audience in the US. The only exception of the Czech dominance was Robert Lang who had only 6:58 of ice time in the game and lost all six faceoffs he faced.
Watching the latter part of the game after Captain Shane Doan left the game was an amazing statement as not only was the Czech (Petr Prucha, Radim Vrbata, and Martin Hanzal) line over due for scoring a big goal but the way the entire team never quit was amazing to watch. This statement is a perfect building block (and lesson) to help the Phoenix Coyotes continue on the path to a victory in this series.
Now add to all this, that Game 3 was on NBC in the United States which makes the statement the Coyotes made in Game 3 carry all the more impressive.
One thing to note….
Both of the Detroit Red Wings goals came from the same EXACT location (Bryzgalov’s upper right side) AND the Red Wings were working shots at that angle for the majority of the game. In my opinion, the Red Wings looked like they did their research on Bryzgalov and made attempts to see if this issue in Bryzgalov’s game still existed.
Detroit Goal #1
Detroit Goal #2
One other thing to note in Detroit’s first goal was that even though Derek Morris’s poke check led to a puck falling onto Valtteri Filppula’s sitck, note that Martin Hanzal looked like he was supposed to cover Filppula but couldn’t/didn’t.
Post game stats from our Twitter feed
Official three stars for Game 3: 3) Henrik Zetterberg – DET 2) Radim Vrbata 1) Petr Prucha – Czech DOMINANCE
Game 3 Stats: Shots on Goal in the 3rd: 14-9 Coyotes
Shots on goal(game): 33-31 Coyotes | Hits 38-31 Wings | Blocked shots 11-8 Coyotes | Take Aways 11-7 Coyotes
Wings won 54% of the faceoffs (won 35 of 65 faceoffs)
Petteri Nokelainen – 6 hits – Aucoin, Korpikoski, Doan, Vrbata, Hanzal, and Yandle all with 3 hits
Vrbata 6 shots on goal – Yandle, Hanzal, Lombardi, Prucha, and Morris all with 3 shots on goal.
10 Coyotes players with at least a +1 in Game 3
All Coyotes players had at least a shot on goal except for Jovocop, Nokelainen, Korpikoski and Doan.
Lang’s stats imply he’s probably not playing in game 4 – TOI 6:58 | Lost all 6 faceoffs he had
Wings Pavel Datsyuk may have been held off the score sheet but he was dominant in the faceoff circle – Won 14 of 20 faceoffs
All wings players had at least 1 shot on goal except for Ericsson, Draper, Abdelkader, and Lilja
Nicklas Lidstrom was an uncharacteristic -3 but led TOI at 26:57, 31 shifts, 3 shots, 3 hits, and 2 blocked shots
I’m not going to analyze this game because the reason the Coyotes loss wasn’t any individual event or play. The Coyotes lost for one reason.
They stopped playing ‘their’ game and allowed the Red Wings to dictate control of the game.
Todd Walsh of Fox Sports Arizona Tweeted during game 2 that the second period of the game was like watching Ali and Fraiser go at it. He is correct in that part of the game. However, this analogy is better served for the entire series.
Remember this line from Rocky 4?
As cheesy as this movie or this line may be, it’s an example of the attitude the Coyotes have to take for the rest of the series.
They must break the Red Wings in order to move on.
What the Red Wings did in game 2 was attack the Coyotes again, and again until they broke down across the board and allowed the Wings to score almost at will. No individual player or coach is to blame here. This was a team loss.
The plus side of this game (if you want to call it that) is that game 2 was a crash course on what the Phoenix Coyotes need to raise their games to in order to win the series.
School is out.
If you all want a hint of what the Red Wings are going to do to attempt to win this series, watch/listen to Dan Cleary’s comments.
Well it wasn’t the best of starts at the beginning. In the back of my mind I was wondering since this was the Coyotes first game since the 2002 season would they come out playing a bit nervous.
As everyone saw, they did. Vernon Fiddler was sent to the box for two extremely uncharacteristic penalties, goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov gave up a soft goal that he wasn’t event paying attention to. Coyotes fans should not even read into or worry about this part of the game. Just file it under ‘playoff butterflies’.
Once the Coyotes got their first goal they seemed to start to get into the flow of the game offensively and defensively. As the game progressed the Coyotes started to play ‘their’ game more and more.
I would have more here but the blackout restrictions of the NHL Gamecenter prevented me from doing a full game analysis.
Good things to take away from this game:
- The Power play and faceoffs dramatically improved two of the biggest issues for the Coyotes going into the post season were their lack of converting on the Power Play and winning faceoffs. The two main keys to their victory saw the Coyotes turn their weaknesses into strengths. Here’s an example of both of these points:
In this video, the Coyotes won a faceoff on the Power Play which leads to Morris scoring.
Keep away from the Detroit puck pressure As we stated in our series preview one of the two ways Detroit would defend against the puck carrier would be to pressure the puck carrier. Well, as you can see in the moments leading up to Wolski’s power play goal, the Coyotes had an answer to this. The movement of the puck to prevent the Red Wings from setting up their smothering defense was simply spectacular.
Just watch…
The Coyotes made a huge statement in game one and it was an entertaining game to watch. However this is a seven game series and this is just one win against a Red Wings team with astronomical playoff experience.
Friday will be an indicator of what direction this series is heading.
The manner in which the Phoenix Coyotes defeated the Nashville Predators (by a score of 5-2 last night at the Jobing.com arena) was a great ending to a a game that started out as bad as it could get.
After the Phoenix Coyotes allowed a Shane Weber goal just 12 seconds into the game I was reminded of how good the Predators were when they exploited their opponents weaknesses. Any little opening the Coyotes gave the Predators was exploited as best as possible.
This is how the game started.
The Coyotes got caught napping again in their defensive zone on the second Predators goal as well as three Coyotes players on the penalty kill were caught in area around the mid slot. This allowed Predators Steve Sullivan a wide open shot for a goal.
However, as we said in the pre-game article, the Coyotes and Predators were just about mirror images of each other. This meant that the Coyotes exploited numerous Predators mistakes too. Most of these mistakes the Predators made resulted in goals.
Here’s an example….
In the video below, Coyotes defenseman Keith Yandle takes the puck behind his own net scans the rest of the ice until he sees not only the Predators napping all the way into the neutral zone. He launches a pass to Wojtek Wolski in the neutral zone and skates right past Predators Defenseman Francis Bouillon for the goal. The Coyotes caught the entire Predators team on the ice napping.
As the game progressed, the Coyotes simply dominated the Predators in just about every aspect of the game. Statistically speaking, just about everyone in the Coyotes lineup got a shot on goal and fifteen of the Coyotes players registered a point. In addition the Coyotes dominated the faceoff circle in every situation last night (even strength, power play, and short handed). This is the kind of effort that the Coyotes will need to tap into if they are to be successful in the post season.
Even with this great game the Coyote showed fans, there remains one glaring problem with the Coyotes:
They are 0 for their last 17 power play opportunities.
If they are going to be successful in the post season, they’re going to have to take their successes from their even strength goals in their game with the Predators and apply it in games moving forward. In the even strength situations that lead to goals, the Coyotes were able to find the mismatch and exploit it for a goal. For whatever reason the Coyotes have not been able to translate that on the power play.
We started this site to meet the growing demand by Coyotes fans in their need for Coyotes News. We do things a bit differently here. We don\'t provide the canned articles you would find on most other sites. We provide analysis, news, and information with a bit of attitude. EDITORIAL MISSION: We let the other guy handle the box scores and stuff like that. We fill in the gaps in coverage....and trust me there are lots of gaps in local coverage that need to be filled.
We started this site to meet the growing demand by Coyotes fans in their need for Coyotes News. We do things a bit differently here. We don\'t provide the canned articles you would find on most other sites. We provide analysis, news, and information with a bit of attitude. EDITORIAL MISSION: We let the other guy handle the box scores and stuff like that. We fill in the gaps in coverage....and trust me there are lots of gaps in local coverage that need to be filled.
