Finally, for the first time in what seems like a month, the Vancouver Canucks played back-to-back strong games, with an impressive score-tied performance against Nashville backed up by a clear victory against Minnesota.

I think that the team's worries with possession are well-documented. Anybody can look at the Canucks' 8-2-3 record in 2012 coming into this week and, even without paying close attention to the stats, thought "no, that does not add up. The team has been terrible, and have been bailed out by their goaltending."

Of course, now the record has jumped up to 10-2-3 in 2012 after this week, with no tough breaks on the schedule until a back-to-back in Detroit and Newark. Check out the schedule for the remainder of the year: that's the only stretch of tough games I see, with that road trip re-routing the team through the American Southwest, but to take on Dallas and Phoenix, teams that the Canucks have had a lot of success against lately.

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"Hey guys, the Canucks are awful at shootouts.

I've watched them a bunch this season and it just seems that way, and since every second game has gone to a shootout lately, the Canucks really need to practice it because they're just bleeding points right now in the race."

That wasn't actually what John Garrett wrote in his Canucks.com column yesterday, but it may as well have been. Garrett isn't particularly known for his restraint. He'll defend the goalie, talk about cheese, complain about his horrible travel schedule, and, if we're really unlucky, discuss hockey.

I didn't know that my favourite analyst had a Canucks.com column, but there you go. I guess I can't let the day pass without fisking his 366-word analysis first:

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After a 7-2-2 month, I suppose I'd be a pretty wet blanket to have to say that the Canucks didn't have all that good of a month of January.

Rather than team record, which we know by now is really deceptive when looking at small samples, I prefer to go by the underlying, and predictive, score-tied Corsi measure. I won't be able to go too in-depth into this due to time constraints, but take a look at the chart here after the jump:

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It seems like we've really gotten to know the Chicago Blackhawks over the last few years, but how much do we really know the Chicago Blackhawks, man? Do we really know anybody? Do we have a mock-up of their powerplay and penalty kill structures, their breakout strategy, and know exactly the role that Joel Quenneville has for each of his players?

Do we know Patrick Kane's favourite movie?

I don't think we ever knew Chicago. Last year, they were an 8-seed against the 1-seed Vancouver Canucks and should have, by traditional measures, been a heavy underdog. The Hawks, however lucky they were to get into the playoffs based on them failing to win Game 82 to enter, we're also extremely unlucky to be on the edge. They were the 3rd best team in the league in Fenwick Tied, one spot ahead of the Canucks (who had the advantage in Corsi, if I recall correctly) and 7th in the NHL in goal differential.

Chicago, unfortunately for them, weren't higher in the standings simply because they apparently weren't clutch enough (that's a total lie, because clutch isn't an actual thing). They were 16-13-9 in one-goal games after being 25-9-8 a season before, dropping them from 6th to 25th in one-goal game winning percentage. Either clutch isn't a real thing, or the guys they lost after their Stanley Cup run were the real clutch guys.

Anyways.

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Again, a pretty short post today. I'm dealing with a lot of office/administrative issues this week which has cut a lot of time out of my writing, so I'll make a couple of points today about penalties.

I think the Canucks online community, particularly what we find at Nucks Misconduct (as with every SB Nation site) is a collection of diehard fans who also appreciate all aspects of the game, whether it's defense or the finer points of the game. This isn't a slight on the guys who call in to Team 1040 or post on the Canucks message boards; I just kind of think that they're stupid. When I'm looking for an educated fan's take on an event, I'll typically go to that team's SB Nation page and check the comments section.

So, a recurring theme around here, I've noticed, is the amount of penalties the Sedins take in the offensive zone. This happens for two reasons:

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This will be a pretty short post today, unfortunately, however I wanted to direct your attention to a pretty good bit of math done over by our SB Nation buddies over at Broad Street Hockey yesterday. Eric T., who is a pretty good follow if you're a hockey fan and on Twitter, upon noticing how much better the Washington Capitals were with the score-tied at even strength than they were in any other game state, decided to look at adjusted shot metrics for every game state, not just score-tied.

For those new at this, the measure I use to determine the quality of a team is their score-tied Corsi rate or score-tied Fenwick rate. Corsi and Fenwick rates are shot differential equations. They're best counted with the score tied because the game wildly changes with one team up by one or two goals: the team that is behind will press more, creating more shots and scoring chances. We don't exactly know why yet, but the stats tell us these things happen, and the stats never lie.

Never ever ever.

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The Canucks have played in a lot of shootouts recently, scoring, if memory serves correct, twice on nine attempts while allowing goals on, again, I'm chalking this up to memory, three times on ten attempts.

The goaltending has been pretty solid. I think we have enough shootout data over 6 years of doing this shameless post-tied-game ritual to determine that the total NHL save percentage is .674, meaning the total NHL shooting percentage is .326.

Before I go on with the rest of this post, I'll mention I piggy-backed a bit off of a couple of links that Jordan posted in the Buzz section this morning, in particular this piece from Gord MacIntyre highlighting Mike Gillis' interview on Team 1040. There are a lot of things to discuss, but I figure that the shootout bit is more relevant.

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The hockey sphere has been pre-occupied somewhat over the last few weeks. I believe those of us who follow the Vancouver Canucks have had to deal with Christmas, the World Juniors, fall-out from the World Juniors, a seven-game series against the Boston Bruins and I think only now people are starting to realize how badly the team has played lately.

There are the usual storylines to fall back on, finally. Day-to-day nuance became harder to ignore where there weren't any phony controversies to pop up and be discussed by one or two loudmouths, ergo ensuring that my Twitter feed would blow up with 500 consecutive tweets about how they don't care about the day's story.

I joked around yesterday that Alain Vigneault and Ryan Kesler conspired to create the day's talking points and thus taking pressure off the fact that the Canucks have been, as alluded to above, playing some bad hockey collectively as a group. Everybody will have a different take on the he-said-he-said, ignore Cody Hodgson's recent game, ignore Alexander Edler's recent game, and ensure that the coaching staff is able to make the right adjustments on the team's struggling players.

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