Canucks Notebook: A Familiar Face

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Adam Gaudette’s NHL tour has taken him to the nation’s capital, where he will make his Ottawa Senators debut on Wednesday against the team with which he first broke into the NHL.

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The Vancouver Canucks conclude a five-game swing Wednesday at the Canadian Tire Center in Kanata, Ontario, and for Gaudette, it will be his first game in a senators uniform after being claimed for waivers by the Chicago Blackhawks over the end of week.

Gaudette, who fell out of favor on the ice during the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs and often found himself playing wing last season, will line up as center for the Senators.

“I’ve played downtown my entire life and I’m excited to be back where I feel most comfortable,” he told Ottawa reporters Tuesday morning. “I don’t mind playing wing, and I’ll play wherever I need to play, but I think I’m a natural center. I’ve been working on my matchups because I haven’t been able to take too many this year.

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“I feel like I’ve improved them in the last year, so I’m excited to get into the games and get that part of my game going.”

His best season in Vancouver was the 2019-20 campaign shortened by COVID-19, when he scored 12 goals and 21 assists in 59 games.

He was traded to the Blackhawks at the trade deadline last season after being Patient Zero in the devastating team-wide COVID outbreak of the Canucks.

He had an initial burst of success with the Blackhawks, but came in a bit this season and didn’t even dress for Chicago in any of his games against the Canucks this season.

Breaking even

In the midst of it all – a losing streak, managerial-level chaos, openly going after new coaches while the current coach is still employed – something truly unfair to do to their current employee, the Canucks have managed to get their games back. a proposal for balance.

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According to data-tracking site HockeyViz.com, the Canucks are creating enough scoring opportunities to score about 2.25 goals in each game, based on their expected goal metric. And on defense, they are producing shots of a similar quality.

We are now in the age of analytics and one thing we do know is that teams that play at an even pace win about half of their games. And teams that play at that rate get into a lot of one-goal games. One goal games tend to break more or less the same as a series of coin tosses, so in the short run you can win or lose a ton of games in a row, but in the long run they break 50/50, just like a great series of coin tosses.

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