With yet another off day at hand, giving the Kings an apparent much-needed respite after having less than 40 hours to recoup from their Game 7 (even though Sunday was their first game outside of the state of California in a month and their first night in a hotel in nearly 3 weeks), it’s time to look at some more nerd numbers to render actually watching the game unnecessary.

2-11-13/50/4.0

This is Marian Hossa’s scoring line, along with the number of shots on goal, and his commensurate shooting percentage. Hossa is averaging 3.85 shots on goal per game, well ahead of his career regular season average of 3.35, however is only shooting 4.0% to his career average of 12.8. So for even as quietly dominant as he has been so far this post season, he’s still getting stung by a bit of bad luck, and the proverbial Violent Market Correction ™ still appears to be looming.

Patrick Sharp isn’t getting as much vulcanized rubber on net as he did in the regular season (3.13 to 3.81 per game), but even the reduced number isn’t something to be sneezed at for as snakebitten as he’s been, particularly when saddled with Handzus. It was said during the Blues series and it remains even more of a likelihood the longer the playoffs go that there will be an outburst from one if not both of these parties.

“”Hi, yes, I’d like to make a breakfast reservation for two. The name? Hell.”

231.9 – 42.9% – 42.0% – 100.0

Much has been made of the Hawks sitting on leads and as a result getting shelled and hanging on for dear life. Though the shown underlying numbers, with 231.9 minutes played at 5 on 5 being up a goal (and only 1 goal) against he opposition, far and away more than any other team in the playoffs, remaining or not, tell a bit of a different tale.

When up a goal, the Hawks only carry 42.0% of the corsi events/any shot attempt, and not only is their Goals For percentage of 42.9% (6GF to 8GA) as directly correlative as possible given the sample size with their attempts, but their PDO at that situation is a perfect 100.0 (7.2 sh%, .928 sv%), meaning they’re performing exactly to expectation.

This isn’t to say that this is an ideal situation. Obviously having that number at or even above a 50% share would be helpful in decreasing the heart rates of those observing, including but not limited to the coaching staff. There are a lot of factors that prohibit all but the most dominant teams from maintaining that, however. Teams will press when down, and the Hawks are adopting a somewhat conservative approach eliminating high risk plays and cutting shifts shorter, thus killing sustained pressure. In a compacted 7 game series this can get magnified and make it seem like the Hawks are constantly under siege, but the heartening numbers here are that they have had that much time to be able to withstand attacks, and that they’re succeeding without the benefit of an abnormal amount of luck.