Last night, the Vancouver Canucks nearly blew a 3-0 lead, hanging on for a 3-2 victory against the St. Louis Blues. They were not the only team to nearly waste such a lead.

Los Angeles had leads of 2-0 and 3-1, but Phoenix pulled to within one on both occasions. Boston lost 3-1 to Winnipeg after taking a 1-0 lead. Washington took a 1-0 advantage against Pittsburgh, but lost 2-1. Buffalo blew a late 2-goal lead against Montreal, only to win 3-2 in overtime. Columbus took a 4-1 lead over Nashville with 8 minutes left in the 3rd but hung on for a 4-3 win. The Islanders had a 3-1 lead over Ottawa, but lost 5-3.

A night earlier, Dallas had a 3-0 lead over Calgary but they pulled to 3-2. After Dallas scored a late goal to make it 4-2, the Flames eventually made it 4-3. Anaheim was up 4-1 over San Jose, but the Sharks made it 4-3 before the Ducks scored an empty net goal. That prompted this comment from fearthefin:

How many more thousands of times does the trailing team need to dominate their opponent in the 3rd before people stop praising the “effort”? — Fear The Fin (@fearthefin) March 19, 2013



If you haven’t noticed a theme, it’s that blowing leads isn’t something that’s singular to the Vancouver Canucks. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is the human element of sports, and the toughest to wrap my head around. The odds tilt in favour of the losing team, no matter what sport you seem to be playing. It’s particularly noticeable in hockey. Basketball has a fixed number of seconds a possession can last. Football has a fixed number of yards a team can cover before eventually possession goes back to the other team. In hockey, one shift can last 20 seconds or one shift can last a minute and 20 seconds.

I didn’t pull out Moneyball last night from the storage locker to simply quote one passage, but I’m going to use it as reference until concepts stick. The key isn’t to look at all problems on a micro level. I agree that the Canucks under Alain Vigneault don’t play as well with the lead as they should. However this was also the case with Marc Crawford, Pat Quinn, and the case of virtually every single coach who has ever coached a sport.

Michael Lewis quotes Bill James’ 1983 Baseball Abstract, writing that “there exists a level of negative momentum,”

which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, team which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players. The corollaries are: Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness is a strength. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.

It’s fairly philosophical, but the beauty about sports is that they’re played by humans, and no human is so flawlessly built that in athletic competition, they can’t be exposed in some manner. In the NHL over a six-month period, the difference between an elite team and a lottery team is 20 wins. That’s three wins per month, or a little less than one extra win per week that between the largest gap in the standings.

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It’s like how the difference between a 20-goal scorer and a 30-goal scorer is one goal every two weeks. Any idiot can appreciate the difference between scoring 20 (a good player) and 30 (a great player) but visualizing alone isn’t enough to cover the difference. This is why I like to look at things at a macro level rather than a micro level. It’s not enough to analyze the Vancouver Canucks inside and out, and the way the Canucks use their players, the way they are coached and managed as it pertains to simply the Canucks. To really get a sense of the Canucks, you need to compare what they do to other teams in similar situations, or other NHL teams. How does each team operate, and what are the differences? For the differences we can quantify, are they positive ones or are they negative ones?

So do the Canucks play more conservatively while ahead, and does this negatively affect the group? There was an interesting post on Hockey Buzz today from Travis Yost, a pretty sharp dude:

Some of the more irritating commentary is how broadcasters and writers will launch shit at the wall when it comes to both playing with the lead, and playing from behind. If a team gives up a goal on a lucky bounce, they’re not mentally tough enough to win late/close hockey games. If a team strings together a couple of statistically unexpected come-from-behind victories, they’re suddenly a team that thrives from playing behind.

Travis goes on a bit about “score effects”, but then he gets to this section:

Vancouver’s a weird team. Why is this team so bad ahead, and so great from behind? This probably requires some in-depth analysis into player usage and game strategy; my guess is a team that once traded Cody Hodgson (et al.) for Zack Kassian (et al.) kind of gets away from their bread and butter. I’d like to see what their numbers look like after forty-eight games — will they normalize a bit, or is this really what Alain Vigneault wants?

The Canucks are 16th in puck-possession while they have the lead, but 1st in puck-possession while trailing. What accounts for the discrepancy?

I’ll admit the following research looks at the discrepancy a different way because most of the grief I’ve heard on Twitter is how Vigneault sits on 2-goal leads. That statement is true, but not exclusive to the Canucks. Behindthenet.ca has five seasons worth of data of puck-possession percentages, calculated by the rate of unblocked shots a team takes, sorted by game scores “tied” “up1” and “up2” or whatever.

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Look at the correlation between puck-possession for teams up by 2 goals and tied games. All but five teams in the past full five seasons give up more possession when ahead than behind:

Those that aren’t by the way, are the 2008 Edmonton Oilers, 2008 Calgary Flames, 2011 Edmonton Oilers, 2012 Montreal Canadiens and 2009 Toronto Maple Leafs. That’s a 2:1 ratio of lottery teams to playoff teams, and I’m guessing the discrepancy exists because of sample size.

So I am willing to say that the Canucks’ problems with the lead this year are a sampling issue. There simply isn’t enough evidence to indicate that past Canuck teams consistently play with less possession when expected when up by two goals as opposed to tied.

I subtracted “up 2” score from “tied” score for every team between 2008 and 2012, and looked at each team who was outside one standard deviation from the median, which was a net loss of 6.22 percentage points for the changed game state:



Year Team Tied Score Up 2 Score Difference 2010 Columbus 48.67 33.44 -15.23 2010 Edmonton 44.61 29.61 -15.00 2008 Vancouver 48.41 34.67 -13.74 2010 Atlanta 49.30 36.55 -12.75 2009 Carolina 54.44 41.80 -12.64 2011 Pittsburgh 54.01 41.73 -12.28 2012 Florida 51.24 39.18 -12.06 2011 Philadelphia 51.61 40.09 -11.52 2012 Boston 52.93 41.76 -11.17 2009 San Jose 56.63 45.54 -11.09 2010 Carolina 48.95 37.89 -11.06 2011 Nashville 52.06 41.13 -10.93 2009 Nashville 48.78 37.85 -10.93 2012 Minnesota 44.54 33.67 -10.87 2008 Buffalo 50.94 40.64 -10.30 2011 New Jersey 53.53 43.48 -10.05 2011 Buffalo 51.65 41.69 -9.96 2012 Tampa Bay 47.89 37.93 -9.96 2009 Edmonton 46.80 36.84 -9.96 2012 Washington 51.26 41.36 -9.90 2011 Anaheim 46.12 36.27 -9.85 2012 Calgary 47.15 37.47 -9.68



The Canucks appear on the list just once, back in 2008. But to see if there was any year-to-year repetition to the extent teams sat on leads, I looked at the 16 teams pre-2012 and compared them to the next season’s results (I didn’t do this with 2012 teams because 2013 isn’t a full season of data) to see if they correlated at all:

Honestly I don’t see enough evidence that this is repeatable, if there’s any.

The Canucks issues with the lead lately stem from sample size. They aren’t one of the teams that regularly get outperformed when “up 2” compared to “tied”. I think this is an issue of people who don’t like Vigneault’s coaching style trying to pick apart things that he does wrong. Sure, the Canucks sit on leads and that’s a problem, but everybody does.

In the macro sense, this isn’t something the Canucks do differently than anybody else.





