On May 11, 2006, Canada faced Latvia at the world championships. It wasn’t much of a game—Canada won 11-0. Nine members of that Latvian team were on the roster in Sochi Wednesday, as Latvia came within a goal of the greatest upset in Olympic history. This wasn’t the first game in which Canada had struggled against a significantly lesser opponent at these Olympics. Their 3-1 win against Norway in the opening game saw similar struggles to score against a much less-talented team.
Generally, statistically minded fans are skeptical of drawing judgments on the basis of small sample sizes. Hockey’s a game with a lot of chance in it and, sometimes, great players are unfortunate. That being said, Canada’s struggles in these Olympics, particularly against Norway and Latvia, are such that they warrant some closer examination.
Take Sidney Crosby. Through four games in Sochi, he’s played a total of 65:14 and been on the ice for just two Canadian goals. We can ask ourselves how common this is by looking at how often it happens in the NHL. From 2010-11 through this year, Crosby had played 164,519 seconds; 65:14 is 3,914 seconds. By numbering the seconds sequentially (i.e. 1-3,914, 2-3,915, etc.) we can go over Crosby’s time on ice and see how common it is for the Pens to score 0 goals, 1 goal, 2 goals, etc. in a stretch of 65:14 with Crosby on the ice.
As the table shows, since 2010-11, Crosby’s last 65:14 of TOI has seen the Pens score two goals or fewer just 5.3 percent of the time.
So the Penguins score two goals or fewer in 65:14 of time with Crosby on the ice about one time in 20. It’s rare but it’s not so rare that it’s instantly suspicious—it happens.
This comes with a caveat though: Canada’s opposition to date at the Olympics hasn’t really been of NHL quality. The Finns would be competitive but Austria, Norway and Latvia would be worse than the worst NHL teams. If Crosby and the Penguins had spent the past four years playing against Finland, Austria, Norway and Latvia, it would likely be far less common for the Pens to score two goals or less in a 65:14 stretch with Crosby on the ice than it has been.
What about Canada as a whole? Canada has played 242.53 minutes of hockey and scored 13 times. That’s 3.22 goals per 60 minutes. It feels low, given that three of those games were against sub-NHL level teams. As you’d expect, Canada has largely dominated those games territorially, outshooting the opposition 168-74. The difficulty lies in the shooting percentage—Canada is finding the back of the net on just 7.8 percent of its shots so far. Is 7.8 percent unusually low?
Let’s leave aside the game against Finland—a 2-1 win in which the Finns were outshot 27-15 isn’t unusual—and focus on Canada’s three games against minnows. Canada has a lengthy history of playing minnows at world championships, which we’ll define as being teams that aren’t Canada, Sweden, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the United States and Switzerland.
The difference between Team Canada Olympic Edition and Team Canada World Championship Edition is significant. Only four members of Team Canada’s 2013 World Championship team are on the Olympic team and only one of those played against Latvia—Dan Hamhuis (P.K. Subban, Mike Smith and Matt Duchene were all healthy scratches). Other than Steven Stamkos, nobody else from that team was good enough for Sochi in the eyes of management. This is typical of Canadian entries at the world championships—they generally contain only a few of Canada’s absolute elite.
For the minnows, it’s different. European leagues are organized to permit their involvement in the world championships and few of their players are in the NHL. Austria had only three NHLers, Norway had one, Latvia one. World Championship minnow-rosters are much more consistent with Olympics rosters because their best players aren’t otherwise engaged in the NHL playoffs.
Even with a greater handicap for Team Canada than for the minnows, Canada tends to blow the smaller countries of international hockey away when they meet at the world championships. There have been 35 meetings at the worlds between Canada and the minnows from 2004 to 2013. Canada is 34-0-1, scoring 198 goals and allowing just 44—an average score of 5.7 to 1.3. Canada has outshot the minnows by an average of 40.7 to 22.2, posting a 13.9 percent shooting percentage and a .943 save percentage.
Olympic Team Canada has outshot the minnows by an even wider margin on average—47 to 19.7. This makes sense— we expect that the improvement from World Championship Team Canada to Olympic Team Canada is greater than the improvement of Olympic Team Minnow over World Championship Team Minnow. Canada’s save percentage against the minnows is 0.949, right in line with the past decade of World Championship play. It’s only the shooting percentage which has failed.
But is it significant? That’s where things get murky. One hundred and forty-one shots against Sochi minnows is a very small sample. That being said, if we expected that Canada would shoot 13.9 percent against them, a 7.8-percent mark is a very unusual result—we’d expect it to come up about one time in 53. Of course, we’d also expect Olympic Team Canada to be even better at finishing than the various iterations of Team Canada that have played in the worlds the past decade. Given the results that have been produced to date, it seems unlikely that that’s the case.
It’s important to acknowledge that this may be deliberate. Canada’s tournament objective isn’t to put countries that aren’t very good to the sword, it’s to win the gold medal. It may be that Mike Babcock and Co. decided to employ a deliberate style to eliminate as many opposition chances as possible, even if it results in lowering Canada’s shooting percentage—the theory being that the team can overwhelm opponents to such a large degree the decline won’t matter. The coaches may be willing to trade blowouts against the lesser teams for a system that they think improves their chances against the best.
Canada can never hope to win a game known as the Miracle on Ice—that’s for lesser hockey countries—but it can certainly be on the losing end of one. Ultimately, Canada dodged a bullet against Latvia—a team awfully similar to one that it beat 11-0 with a much worse team eight years ago. Regardless of whether Canada wins gold, Hockey Canada should spend some time after Sochi evaluating why its team struggled against minnows and whether there’s a way to eliminate that in the future.